Thank you, Diane [Glazer], for that terrific introduction and thank you, Curtis, for inviting me back.  I was talking to Jim Lehrer not too long ago in Washington.  Actually, there's a little bit of history to Jim Lehrer's putting historians regularly on television.  When he first went into public broadcasting it was 1973, at the time of the Watergate hearings in the Senate.  Lehrer had the idea to put on an historian during one of the brief intermissions in the hearings to talk about the historical context of Watergate.  This kind of thing was not done in those days — putting historians on TV.  He made a great choice, he chose the historian Barbara Tuchman, but what he forgot was that the intermission was four minutes and she was known for writing these very long books.  The intermission came and he said Mrs. Tuchman, does anything about Watergate remind you of history?  She said, “Yes, Jim.  To understand Watergate you have to go back to the 14^th century,” and she began to speak.  One minute passed, and two minutes passed, and three minutes and finally it was nearly four minutes and he thought she was coming to the end of her sentence, which relieved him, at which point she said, “Now, Jim.  That brings us to the 15^th century.”  The practical result of all this was that Jim Lehrer did not put historians on television for something like 22 years after that so I was lucky to beat the statute of limitations. 

 One of the occupational hazards of historians is that you have a very great tendency to take on the characteristics of the people that you're writing about because you think about someone 24 hours a day.  In the case of Johnson, you're listing to these tapes of the guy's voice over and over again, and if you're going to become a living replica of, I guess, Mother Teresa or Mohandas Gandhi, that's probably OK, but if you're becoming a living replica of Lyndon Johnson it's a more mixed experience.  When I took on this project this disturbed my wife a great deal until I played her a tape of LBJ talking to Lady Bird, which is one of the great discoveries of what a lovely way he spoke to his wife.  He said, “My darling, I long to see you.”  My wife took one listen to that and said, “This is exactly the book you should be writing.  You should talk more the way he did.” 

 Many of the stories about Johnson sometimes proved not to be true, as juicy as they sometimes are.  [For example] he had asked a speechwriter to write the text of a speech for him.  The speechwriter came in with his text, and it began with a quotation from Aristotle.  [Johnson] looked at it and he said, “The text is fine and I like the quote at the beginning,” but he said, “no one in the audience is going to know who the hell Aristotle was, so keep the quote but change it to 'as my daddy said.'“  It was the kind of thing that did wonders for him.  It would not do wonders for me and so when you're writing about a subject like Johnson you have to keep it very much in your mind that you are you and he is inevitably himself.

 The next book that I'm going to write after The Conquerors is a book on Abraham Lincoln's assassination and that period.  [My interest] goes back actually, to the time I was seven years old and I was taken by my parents to the Lincoln sites in Illinois.  What I really remember was that I was taken to the Lincoln house and I was shown the chair where Lincoln used to read to his sons and I asked the guy – this was a big issue for me at the time – “Tell me.  What did Lincoln do to his sons when they were naughty?  Did he spank them?”  The guy said, “No.  Lincoln never spanked his children.  He just let them run wildly through the house,” and I took one listen to that and Lincoln was the man for me forever more.  I got interested in Lincoln and began saving artifacts and reading books and collecting documents and wanted to write a book especially on the poignant last days of his life.  I finally went to my publisher in about 1992 – I usually have a long lead time on these books – and said, “Next book I want to write after this one on Roosevelt and Truman and Germany is on this subject which I thought of when I was seven,” and I described it and she said, “Why, I think it's a great idea, but I do hope that you're not going to insist on writing on every subject you thought of when you were seven years old.”  That was a fairly easy promise to make. 

 What I thought I would do is talk about The Conquerors tonight and particularly about why it may be germane to some of the things that we're all thinking about nowadays, namely, an impending war with Iraq.  I guess the place to begin is with a Gallup poll taken in 1945, just after we Americans won the war against Hitler.  The question was this:  “Even though we won the war against Hitler, do you expect us Americans to have to fight another war against Germany in our lifetime against some future version of Adolph Hitler?” and Americans said “Yes” by about 70 percent.  They felt that even though Hitler and the Germans had been defeated, it was just a matter of time before the Germans got strong enough to wage a third world war; that there was something almost in the German blood.

 As I began to research this book and I discovered this was a thought that was very deep in Franklin Roosevelt's mind.  He said at one point, “I think this war virus is so deep in the Germans that maybe at the end of the war we'll have to castrate all the German men so they won't keep on reproducing people who want to make war.” 

 In 1943 when he met with Stalin and Churchill they were talking about how to keep the Germans from making war after World War II.  Stalin opened the bidding in a perfectly Stalinist way and said, “Why, I think the way we should do this is to begin by murdering the top 50,000 German military officers.  That will do it.”  Roosevelt, who at that point was trying to butter up Stalin to keep him fighting in the war, said, “Well, you know Uncle Joe, I think that's too harsh.  Why don't we compromise at 49,500?”  Churchill heard this and said, “This is disgusting.  This is just the kind of thing we're fighting this war against” and stormed out of the room.  Stalin came and put his arms around Churchill and said, “Winston, we're only kidding.”  Well, Churchill knew that Stalin was not kidding at all, and to him 50,000 people were absolute peanuts.  What it shows you is how deep this feeling was that because of what the Germans had done in World War I in World War II it was inevitable.

 I start the book in July 1944 with a scene in East Prussia. and Hitler is in his retreat, which was called the Wolf's Lair, and he was getting news about the progress of the war, which, from his point of view, was not good.  The Red Army was coming in from the East. The Brits and Americans had landed on D-Day and were coming in Fortress Europe.  He was unhappy and he was mopping his forehead because it was a hot day and because he was getting bad news and there were all these people around him.  Into this wooden barracks where he was being briefed came a young officer, and it was a young officer that he would have noticed because on one hand he had no fingers, and on the other hand he had only three fingers.  He was using these three fingers to carry a briefcase. 

 The guy's name was Claus von Stauffenberg.  He was a young officer who had fought in North Africa in 1942.  His fingers had been blown off by an Allied mine but despite this, when he learned about the German brutality in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, he began to think, “We Germans have to assassinate Adolph Hitler and come up with a new government.”  There were a number of conspirators who plotted against Hitler and so von Stauffenberg went to the Wolf’s Lair, with a briefcase.  Inside the briefcase was a shirt, and swaddled in the shirt was a ticking time bomb.  He left it under the table, went outside the barracks, the bomb went off, he saw blue smoke and flames and then he saw a stretcher being carried out.  On the stretcher was a body, and over the body was Hitler's cloak, so he assumed that Hitler was dead.  He got in the getaway car and got into a plane to Berlin.  He went to the military headquarters where there were other conspirators, and he was about to declare a new government of Germany.  But then they were told that Hitler, in fact, was not dead.  What had happened was one of the other guys in the barracks had kicked the briefcase, by pure accident, under the other side of the oak support that was underneath this table.  So when the bomb went off, Hitler was protected.  His trousers were in shreds but he survived. 

 At first Hitler was exhilarated.  He said divine providence had saved him for his mission.  Then he was furious, because he knew that there were people very close to him who wanted to see him dead.  He ordered these people caught, and the first to be caught — it wasn't very hard to see who had done it — was von Stauffenberg, who was at the military headquarters on Bendler Street in Berlin.  He was taken out that night before a firing squad and, just before the guns were fired, he called out, “Long live eternal Germany!”

 Hitler said there should be a purge of anyone who might conceivably be plotting against him, and about 5,000 people were taken to prison, many of them killed.  The chief plotters were hung from meat hooks at Hitler's very specific order.  Not only did this happen, but they were naked before they were put in the noose except for trousers that had no belts, so that when they were in their death agony the trousers would fall off and they would be deprived of even the dignity of not being naked.  [Hitler] went on: he said, “There should be films.”  So a motion picture was made of this and it was flown to the Wolf's Lair; Hitler saw it in his private theatre with Joseph Goebbe and his propagandists.  Goebbe was not exactly known as being a sensitive guy, but even he saw this and almost fainted.  That was life under Hitler at the time. 

 And so in writing this first scene my idea was, what was Roosevelt's reaction?  Roosevelt was in San Diego just about to accept the nomination for president in 1944.  He must have been delighted to get the first news, which was that there was a plot against Hitler and it may have succeeded.  What I was astounded to find was that Roosevelt's reaction was the opposite.  When he heard about the plot he was terrified that Hitler might have been murdered because there would have been a new junta in Berlin.  He was terrified all through the war that a new junta might make a deal with Stalin to shut down the eastern front and let the Nazis turn the full brunt of their fighting against the Brits and Americans — in which case we would have lost that war.  What it shows us is the good side of Roosevelt.  Roosevelt was so aware that you had to do something about the Germans to make sure that this did not happen again after World War II, he was the one who, against the advise of almost all his advisors, against Churchill's advice, said, “We've got to fight this war to an unconditional surrender.  Absolute victory over Hitler.  We have to march to Berlin, occupy the country and make it a new democracy.  Exactly what we did not do in World War I.”  If it were not for that, I think Germany would not be a democracy today because we might very well have had the same thing that happened after World War I, which is that the Germans would have signed a treaty and they would have come back and it would have happened all over again.  That's the wonderful side of Roosevelt that I learned of and that I've written about.   

The bad side is something that I think is a lot more grave and that is this:  Roosevelt talks a lot in private about what's wrong with Germany and he's saying, “What's wrong with the Germans is something I know.  I'm an expert on Germany because I was there when I was a kid.”  So I would read these accounts of these conversations where he said, “I have a German history.”  What was his German history?  It turns out that Roosevelt had been in Germany about half dozen times with his elderly parents who took him to a British spa in southern Germany.  Through the windows, I guess, he saw some Germans, but it wasn't too much more than that.  So, he's talking about what is in the Germans that makes them so terrifying.  “Well, they like to fly gliders.  They like to march.  They like to wear uniforms and they like to sing military songs.”  All this sure is true, but I'm reading this and this is like someone in a parallel universe, because in the early 1940s it does not take a rocket scientist to know what you had to fear most about the Germans was not marching or songs or gliders but that they were perpetrating the most monstrous crime in human history, trying to remove an entire people from the face of the earth. 

 So, as I got into that, I found that Roosevelt, as early as 1942, had very specific evidence about the Holocaust.  Jewish leaders and others would come to him and beg and say, “Make a speech.  Reveal this to the world, what Hitler is doing, which he is trying to keep secret.  Show the pubic what we have and say 'this is the reason we're fighting this war against Hitler,' and when we win, the people who are doing this horrible thing will be the first to be punished, and punished with the most severe measures.”  Every time Roosevelt was asked to do this, he said, “No.  I'm not going to talk about it and my answer is ‘let's just get the war won.’”  He was asked through 1943 and into '44 to relax on the immigration quotas, to let in Jewish refugees and others.  He refused to use this political coin.  You begin to wonder why was Roosevelt so indifferent to something that, when Churchill was told about, his immediate reaction was “This is the worst crime in human history,” and immediately asked his air force, “Isn't there something we can do?  Maybe we should bomb the death camps?” 

 What I found was this: in late 1943, Henry Morgenthau was the Secretary of the Treasury, and the second Jew in history to be a member of a President's cabinet.  He was a very unobservant Jew.  So much so that by that time he was about 50-years old, he had never attended a Passover Seder in his life.  His children were told to tell people that they were not Jewish; they were supposed to say they were Americans when they were asked their religion.  So this was not a particularly ethnic guy, but treasured his relationship with Roosevelt above all.  He once said that it was the most important thing in his life.  He also said that Roosevelt “always made me feel so insecure that he never made me feel that I would have the job tomorrow.” Although Morgenthau was a rich man was in Washington, for 12 years as Secretary of the Treasury never felt secure enough too actually buy house, but kept on moving from one rented furnished house to another because he thought that his friend would can him.   

Despite all the above, he was told about the Holocaust by the rabbi who had actually married him to his wife, and who said, “Henry, did you know that they're making lamp shades out of the skins of the Jews?” at that point he became a completely changed person.   He decided that even if Roosevelt canned him he would go to the President and say, “Your inaction has to stop.”  So, what happened was that in January 1944 Morgenthau goes to the Oval Office and under his arm is a report, which is labeled Report on the Acquiescence of the American Government in the Murder of the Jews.  He went to Roosevelt and said, “This is what is happening and you have refused to do anything about it and this has to stop.” 

 What moved Roosevelt, and this does not reflect well on him, was not the moral issue but Morgenthau said, “You have a political problem because members of Congress know about this and unless you act you are going to have a political scandal.  People are going to ask why you have done very little for the last year and one-half to directly stop the killing.”  He did not need to go on to say that Roosevelt had had about 80 to 90 percent of the Jewish vote in his first three elections.  If he lost that in 1944, he probably would lose the election.  In retrospect, that was absolutely right.  So, it led Roosevelt to move a little bit on refugees, but not much.  A lot of people lost their lives as a result.  So it leads to the question “Why was Roosevelt unable to see this?”

 One way of explaining this is that early in the war Morgenthau was having lunch with Roosevelt and with a Catholic official named Leo Crowley and Roosevelt said to them, “You guys have to remember that America is a Protestant country and you Catholics and Jews are here under suffrage and therefore you have to do everything that I ask.”  And Morgenthau, who loved Roosevelt, went back to his office and said, “What the hell am I working so hard for if America is not for me?”   

Roosevelt had a tendency to feel that if someone came with a request, especially in wartime, for their group, or which somehow benefited their group, and this included Catholic-Americans as well, it was somehow less legitimate than if a Protestant-American in 1940 had come to him and said, “I think you should aid Britain,” — about that he would not have been suspicious.  It doesn't reflect well on him.  I think also he was oversensitive to the danger that people might say that he was fighting World War II to help American Jews.  There's one quote I have in the book where he tells Joseph Kennedy, of all people, “I think that if an American demagogue took up anti-Semitism there would be more blood running through the streets of New York City than through the streets of Berlin.”  I think he was wrong, but it shows you his mindset.  So the result of this was that a lot of lives were lost and FDR, whom I think of as a great president, who is, probably more than any other American, responsible for the fact that we won World War II, his behavior on the Holocaust will always be a shadow on that reputation.

 What happened next is this:  Moregenthau was radicalized by what he had learned about the Holocaust and worried that there was a tendency, especially in the State Department, to think that when we win World War II “let's get out as quickly as possible and get the Germans on their feet and treat the country as if it was like the occupation of Mexico after the Mexican War or perhaps after the Spanish-American War.  “His point was that the Germans had done something that was uniquely horrible.  It led him to propose something called the Morgenthau Plan, which was to crush the Germans, reduce them to the most basic level of primitive existence so that they would know that they had lost the war and also so that Germany could not come back to plague the world.  Roosevelt in the fall of 1944 actually endorsed this, and he went to Quebec and met Winston Churchill and said to Churchill, “I want you to sign this on the bottom line.”  Churchill said, “I think this is too harsh.  It will actually have the opposite affect because it will make the Germans resentful and want to fight back.”  This is such a metaphor for their relationship — Roosevelt said, “Unless you sign this I'm going to withdraw all American cash after VE-day,” and Churchill said, “Where do I sign?” and he signed.  What happened then was, and this is so familiar to all of us in 2002, it was leaked to the newspapers by the Secretary of State, who hated the idea of this plan. 

 In the fall of 1944, Roosevelt was a very sick man.  You see scenes of him where he is signing important documents and changing policy and the next day he does not remember having signed them.  I found from some of the new diaries that have been opened that Roosevelt was actually thinking about quitting the presidency after winning the war and leaving the presidency to Harry Truman.  He had actually thought about this so much, that one of the things he said was, “After I'm no longer president, I'd like to be the first secretary general of the United Nations” and he actually was thinking of locating the UN headquarters at Hyde Park where he lived so that it would be convenient for him and putting in an airstrip that people could land on and come over to see him.   

At the end of his life Roosevelt was not the leader he had been before.  He was working about two to four hours a day.  In a way, because Roosevelt was so diminished, it was a good thing that Harry Truman became president in April of 1945.  Once again, you look at these leaders and they have very complex sides.   

In April of 1945, at a time when on the front pages of every newspaper in this country were the first pictures of the death camps being opened, even American anti-Semitics were saying, “How could I have said and done such things about a people that suffered so much?”  In Truman's case, even though he was a humane man, you see entries in his diary, literally the evening of the day that he would see a picture like that, in which he would say things like, “The Jews think they're God's chosen people.  I think God had better judgment.”  You just wonder about the complexities of a mind that could go on to be the first to recognize Israel in 1948 and at the same time write things like this.  It shows how complex and interesting these presidents sometimes are when you begin to understand their private lives. 

 But Truman changed the history of all this in one important way.  In the summer of 1945 he went to Potsdam to see Churchill and Stalin and was taken to defeated Berlin in a car — you know, if that had been Roosevelt, given his flamboyancy, it probably would have been a military pageant, you know, the conqueror entering Berlin — but Truman being Truman just got into a car and was driven in.  He saw Hitler's bunker and he saw these defeated Germans and what it reminded him of most of all what his Confederate grandmother had told him about her years after the Civil War in Missouri.  She said, “You know, Harry, the Yankees burned our barns and took our horses and we were so bitter against them that it really was much worse for the Yankees than had they treated us with greater consideration.”  So that was what Truman was thinking about what to do with Germany at the end of the war.  What he finally did was punish the Nazis, have more crime trials, get them out of positions of power, but at the same time show the Germans that America and our system are wonderful things and why they should try to emulate us. 

 It was a very difficult thing to do both at the same time, but we Americans were aided by the performance of the Red Army which was entering Germany from the east, and raped upwards of two million German women, in many cases in front of their children.  Not exactly a great advertisement for the Soviet system at a time that we had to compete against the Soviet Union for Germany loyalties. 

 So where this all comes out is when Dwight Eisenhower was the first military governor of the United States in Germany and he was meeting with his staff in the fall of 1945 he said to them, “You may think that we have won World War II, but we don't know that yet.  We won't know that we have won the war against Germany until 50 years from now” — this was 1945 —  “If we know 50 years from now that Germany is a peaceful and stable and prosperous democracy then we will really know that we've won World War II against Hitler.”   Ike was very smart.  Germany by no means is a perfect system, but few of us today would say that a great anxiety we have is that Germany will cause another world war, cause our sons and daughters to have to fight. 

 I close the book with sort of a snapshot that makes the point that, leaders, when they're fighting wars, oftentimes, even if the war is going well, get very pessimistic about what might happen.  Roosevelt when he met with Churchill would talk about what would have happened if Hitler had invaded Berlin successfully in 1940, and Truman, when he went to defeated Berlin, thought about what Hitler would have done to Washington, D.C., had he conquered this country.  We don't know what Hitler would have done but you can imagine and I write about it at the end of the book.  There probably would have been swastikas on the White House and on the Capitol, they probably would have destroyed the houses of Roosevelt and Truman in Hyde Park, New York and Independence, Missouri, because those would have been rallying points for the pre-Nazi American causes. 

 What we do know is what Hitler planned to do with Berlin if he won.  There are very elaborate plans, which I've seen.  He was going to tear down almost everything that had been there before and turn the city into something called Germania with an enormous capital about 15 times the size of the American capital, and build a wonderful building called the Palace of the Fuehrer.  For all of you who have seen Grauman’s Chinese Theater, it looks just like that on a larger scale except without the taste and the architectural distinction.  The big feature was there was this long tunnel, and if you were a foreign leader who was going to visit Emperor Hitler after World War II you would have had to walk through this tunnel so that you'd be panting and sweating by the time you were admitted to the great man's presence.  He was thinking very much ahead. 

 Fortunately, none of that came to pass.  If you had to think of a scene that really makes the point that we won the war and we won the peace, go to Berlin today.  You see all those buildings that are Japanese and American and British — the architecture is exactly the opposite of what Hitler wanted.  It's quite chaotic and wonderful and very energetic.  You'll see young kids walking with purple spiked hair with rings through their cheeks, and that's exactly what would horrify Hitler if he knew that's what German youth look like nowadays.  The wonderful thing that really summarizes it is there are World War II monuments in Berlin and that's very much what Hitler wanted.  He wanted there to be World War II monuments, but they're not what Hitler had in mind — monuments to Hitler and Himmler and Goering.  They're actually monuments, in many cases, to the people who tried to kill Hitler and Himmler and Goering.  If you go to Hitler's bunker the spot is still there, though it's been mainly destroyed, you'll have to go past a museum of the Holocaust, which would also horrify him.  You can actually see the military headquarters where von Stauffenberg was shot to dead the day he tried to kill Hitler in 1944.  The wonderful thing that makes the point that we won is that it's no longer the Nazi military headquarters; it is now a museum to the heroes of the Resistance and it's still on Bendler Street — but Bendler Street is not the name of the street any more.  The street is named for von Stauffenberg.  That shows how we won the war.

 Thank you very much.