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Interview With Douglas Brinkley

Aired February 06, 2004 - 14:18   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: The Iraq war is not the first to be fought on the basis of some faulty intelligence. Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley is out with a new book "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War." Timing is everything, isn't it, Professor Brinkley?
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: I can't help it if I'm lucky.

O'BRIEN: Enjoy that run. No. 10 on the best seller list right now.

Let's do a quick tour of U.S. history if we can. And the first war that comes to mind in your mind where perhaps a president or at least people in Washington perhaps misused or manipulated the real situation as it was on the ground in order to do some other thing, some other agenda at work.

BRINKLEY: One of the analogies is with the Mexican-American War in the 1840s. President James K. Polk came in with a preset agenda. He was an expansionist president and he wanted to acquire the land which is present day southern California, New Mexico, Arizona. He offered to buy it from Mexico, Mexico said no.

So Polk dispatched General Zachary Taylor to the Rio Grande River and said give me a pretext for war, get me some intelligence about the Mexicans coming over the border and disrupting towns in Texas. We've got to find a way to go to war.

And of course, Taylor delivered the goods to Polk and the rest is history. We went to war, we ended up defeating Mexico and claiming all that land which is the southwestern part of the United States.

O'BRIEN: In the end, how much did this harm James Polk as a president? He was a one-term president.

BRINKLEY: He came in saying I'm only going to serve one term and that's it. I'm going to do two things. No matter what I'm going to acquire that land and I'm going settle a boundary dispute in Oregon with Britain on the Canadian border.

As so Polk is seen as a successful president because he did this. The truth is we had no reason to go to war. Of course Henry David Thoreau went and protested the war and wrote his famous essay on civil disobedience.

But Polk wanted the intelligence information to show that Mexico were actually the aggressors when in fact the United States was.

O'BRIEN: Let's move on to another war. Turn of the century, Spanish American war. Remember the Maine. This was a case where U.S. battleship blew up mysteriously in Havana Harbor. And there was a lot of interpretation by the media in the wake of that.

BRINKLEY: Absolutely. Well the Maine got blown up on February 15, 1898. And immediately the jingoist, the imperialists and President McKinley, the people that wanted war with Spain, seized upon this and said look, Spain bombed this ship, they've mined the harbor and blew up the Maine. That became the great rally cry, remember the Maine.

In truth, as we know, in 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover wrote the report and we know now that the Maine was a boiler explosion, meaning it was not bombed by Spain.

So we went to war with Spain under a false premise simply because we wanted to go to war we were simply and using whatever intelligence we could even if it was faulty to bring us to war.

O'BRIEN: Here's one that's kind of kind of the converse of all of this. In cases where there is stark evidence -- maybe it's only in retrospect, but nevertheless, intelligence evidence of something happening, and it is ignored. This is what we're talking about in the case of Pearl Harbor.

BRINKLEY: Yes, there's a whole literature, cottage industry of backdoor to war theses, meaning that Franklin Roosevelt wanted the ships bombed at Pearl Harbor.

I don't buy into that all. I think it's bunk. But what is true is that there were a lot of intelligence clues that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. There had been a even novel that was being taught at the U.S. Navel War College starting i 1932 which was basically laying out a scheme of Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor and there were endless -- iff you look at dispatches starting in March of 1941, warnings that were coming right up till December 6, 1941.

The problem with that is when you're dealing with intelligence you're dealing with thousands and thousands of documents. And what -- history is easy in hindsight. Pearl Harbor happened and we can look for a document, a needle in a hay stack. Hey, here's a piece of evidence the administration knew.

Where in truth, the Bush or Roosevelt administration or McKinley, you're just being inundated with intelligence information. It's hard to pick what is real and what's not.

And so in retrospect we can look at those Pearl Harbor documents and say boy, Somebody should have known it was happening, but the world moves at a very fast and fluid pace. And hindsight is cheap.

O'BRIEN: One other war we can talk about -- and we haven't hit the all, of course. But Gulf of Tonkin and Vietnam. BRINKLEY: That's of course one that's in the news a lot. President Lyndon Johnson again looking for a pretext to get more involved in Southeast Asia and Vietnam.

And there's a big dispute. Was the USS Maddux fired upon by the North Vietnamese? They claim they never fired on our ship. There's only one bullet hole there that was any evidence.

And most people today believe the Maddux and the Turner Joy were not fired on by the North Vietnamese, that Johnson used it to pass the famous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964.

O'BRIEN: And we're out of time, unfortunately, Doug Brinkley. Fascinating. We appreciate that, a little walk down history. Talk about U.S. condensed history.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com







Aired February 6, 2004 - 14:18   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: The Iraq war is not the first to be fought on the basis of some faulty intelligence. Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley is out with a new book "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War." Timing is everything, isn't it, Professor Brinkley?
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: I can't help it if I'm lucky.

O'BRIEN: Enjoy that run. No. 10 on the best seller list right now.

Let's do a quick tour of U.S. history if we can. And the first war that comes to mind in your mind where perhaps a president or at least people in Washington perhaps misused or manipulated the real situation as it was on the ground in order to do some other thing, some other agenda at work.

BRINKLEY: One of the analogies is with the Mexican-American War in the 1840s. President James K. Polk came in with a preset agenda. He was an expansionist president and he wanted to acquire the land which is present day southern California, New Mexico, Arizona. He offered to buy it from Mexico, Mexico said no.

So Polk dispatched General Zachary Taylor to the Rio Grande River and said give me a pretext for war, get me some intelligence about the Mexicans coming over the border and disrupting towns in Texas. We've got to find a way to go to war.

And of course, Taylor delivered the goods to Polk and the rest is history. We went to war, we ended up defeating Mexico and claiming all that land which is the southwestern part of the United States.

O'BRIEN: In the end, how much did this harm James Polk as a president? He was a one-term president.

BRINKLEY: He came in saying I'm only going to serve one term and that's it. I'm going to do two things. No matter what I'm going to acquire that land and I'm going settle a boundary dispute in Oregon with Britain on the Canadian border.

As so Polk is seen as a successful president because he did this. The truth is we had no reason to go to war. Of course Henry David Thoreau went and protested the war and wrote his famous essay on civil disobedience.

But Polk wanted the intelligence information to show that Mexico were actually the aggressors when in fact the United States was.

O'BRIEN: Let's move on to another war. Turn of the century, Spanish American war. Remember the Maine. This was a case where U.S. battleship blew up mysteriously in Havana Harbor. And there was a lot of interpretation by the media in the wake of that.

BRINKLEY: Absolutely. Well the Maine got blown up on February 15, 1898. And immediately the jingoist, the imperialists and President McKinley, the people that wanted war with Spain, seized upon this and said look, Spain bombed this ship, they've mined the harbor and blew up the Maine. That became the great rally cry, remember the Maine.

In truth, as we know, in 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover wrote the report and we know now that the Maine was a boiler explosion, meaning it was not bombed by Spain.

So we went to war with Spain under a false premise simply because we wanted to go to war we were simply and using whatever intelligence we could even if it was faulty to bring us to war.

O'BRIEN: Here's one that's kind of kind of the converse of all of this. In cases where there is stark evidence -- maybe it's only in retrospect, but nevertheless, intelligence evidence of something happening, and it is ignored. This is what we're talking about in the case of Pearl Harbor.

BRINKLEY: Yes, there's a whole literature, cottage industry of backdoor to war theses, meaning that Franklin Roosevelt wanted the ships bombed at Pearl Harbor.

I don't buy into that all. I think it's bunk. But what is true is that there were a lot of intelligence clues that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. There had been a even novel that was being taught at the U.S. Navel War College starting i 1932 which was basically laying out a scheme of Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor and there were endless -- iff you look at dispatches starting in March of 1941, warnings that were coming right up till December 6, 1941.

The problem with that is when you're dealing with intelligence you're dealing with thousands and thousands of documents. And what -- history is easy in hindsight. Pearl Harbor happened and we can look for a document, a needle in a hay stack. Hey, here's a piece of evidence the administration knew.

Where in truth, the Bush or Roosevelt administration or McKinley, you're just being inundated with intelligence information. It's hard to pick what is real and what's not.

And so in retrospect we can look at those Pearl Harbor documents and say boy, Somebody should have known it was happening, but the world moves at a very fast and fluid pace. And hindsight is cheap.

O'BRIEN: One other war we can talk about -- and we haven't hit the all, of course. But Gulf of Tonkin and Vietnam. BRINKLEY: That's of course one that's in the news a lot. President Lyndon Johnson again looking for a pretext to get more involved in Southeast Asia and Vietnam.

And there's a big dispute. Was the USS Maddux fired upon by the North Vietnamese? They claim they never fired on our ship. There's only one bullet hole there that was any evidence.

And most people today believe the Maddux and the Turner Joy were not fired on by the North Vietnamese, that Johnson used it to pass the famous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964.

O'BRIEN: And we're out of time, unfortunately, Doug Brinkley. Fascinating. We appreciate that, a little walk down history. Talk about U.S. condensed history.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com