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CNN Saturday Morning News

Interview With David Brinkley

Aired October 05, 2002 - 07:33   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 winds of war may be upon us, and as the president prepares to address the nation Monday night about the situation in Iraq, we thought it might be worth looking at some historical parallels and look at the intersection of politics, the presidency, and war and how all three become intertwined and how all three can define a presidency.
For that we turn to Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian of great note. His latest book is "The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today." The book is co- authored by another well-known historian by the name of Stephen Ambrose.

Mr. Brinkley, good to have you with us.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: Well, good morning. Thanks for having me.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's talk about historical parallels. When you think of presidents, in George W. Bush's decision -- as you look back in the historical record, what president comes to mind when you think of an apt analogy?

BRINKLEY: Harry Truman comes to mind immediately, because Truman came in with very low expectations, was met with numerous crises, mainly ending the second World War by dropping the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But, then, had to forge, if you'd like, two different wars. A larger war, which is called the Cold War, and he had to create the new national security state -- creating the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, the Department of Defense -- you know -- the Air Force Department, CIA -- all came under Truman's national security umbrella, all to defeat this kind of world -- ugly world -- trend called communism.

And he became the leader of the anti-communist crusade. In that anti-communist crusade he had the Korean War.

And here's the danger to George W. Bush. Korea really crippled Truman's administration. Although now we look at the Korean War as the war being won; in 1952, Truman did not even run for re-election. He simply stepped aside because the war was so widely unpopular and Dwight Eisenhower came in and won that election over Adlai Stevenson.

And so you see in George W. Bush his trying to build a new Homeland Security, trying to fight this larger war, his war on terrorism all over the globe, at the same time focusing in on Iraq in a very serious way and trying to marshal U.N. support against Iraq the same way Truman had to dealing with North Korea's invasion of South Korea.

O'BRIEN: I suppose the simplistic way to view what happened with Truman in Korea is perhaps it was overreaching a little bit. Is there -- it's probably a little more complex than that, isn't it?

BRINKLEY: It is more complex. I mean, what -- the -- in the Korean situation was, at first, a very clear objective. We were simply going to push North Korea out of South Korea back over the parallel. It was much more like pushing the Iraqis out of Kuwait during the Gulf War.

But, once we achieved that objective, then the thought was this notion of liberating the entire Korean peninsula.

When, hence, China came into play, our forces were unable to do that, and we finally had to -- if you like -- back track to our first policy.

So, these are the problems that I think if I were president, if I were President Bush, I would be looking at Harry Truman very carefully, trying to learn lessons from the Korean War.

And -- you know -- the problem in Iraq is we may be able to go in there with all of our military might, we may be able to land 100,000 or 200,000 troops, we may be able to have regime change and get rid of Saddam Hussein, but what do we do once our troops are there? That's always been the problem of recent wars, particularly Korea and Vietnam, when we're stuck this far away from this hemisphere.

O'BRIEN: I guess it's an understatement to say that wars are make and break propositions for presidents. When you look at George Herbert Walker Bush, Bush Number 41, and you look at his -- what the Persian Gulf War did for him -- it raised his popularity ratings to astonishing highs, and yet, in the end, it wasn't enough. Why not?

BRINKLEY: The economy. It's the issue the Democrats are trying to re-drum up right now, the state of our economy at this moment, with the election coming into play. But, yes, war is a way that immediately that a president's going to be put into.

If the presidency is called an exclusive club, the most exclusive in the exclusive club are wartime presidents, people like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. You're immediately being dealt with a major crisis.

George W. Bush has the possibility to go down as a great president because he's had to deal with this post-9/11 world, to start leading a new crusade, really, against terrorism around the globe, and to go to war, first in Afghanistan to oust al Qaeda which he's been largely successful on, although the nation building part is unclear yet. Now, in Iraq, it's to get rid of Saddam Hussein's regime, a harder task, and if he accomplishes that and can somehow start a new more Democratic Iraq, which is a very large order, he will go down as a very, very important president. But the dangers of having something go wrong, of us being stuck in Iraq, of a thousand things that could go haywire in the Middle East, could really undermine his presidency as it undermined Harry Truman, so he was unable to run for reelection in '52 and it also undermined Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

Remember, LBJ did not seek reelection; he stepped aside because Vietnam had had him -- our country, and his administration -- in such a quagmire.

O'BRIEN: Now, Vietnam brought down Lyndon Baines Johnson and as we look back on that, it was probably accurate to say that the people in Washington were not taking an honest look at what was really happening in Vietnam. Do you have the sense that those lessons remain learned lessons in Washington and that there will be an honest and frank appraisal of how this war on terrorism is going, whatever front it might lead us to?

BRINKLEY: That's a very good question. I don't know. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution -- only two senators dissented which really got us involved with the Vietnam War. When Johnson escalated the troops, nobody wanted to be perceived as being anti-communist, so many senators, who later regretted their votes.

I think what's important now is that each person in the senate, each person in Congress, anybody on the political landscape today, tries to put aside partisan politics and analyze the global situation and come up with what they think in their heart of hearts is best for the interest of the United States.

And, so, I think a debate over Iraq is important and I also think this effort to go through the United Nations and try to get allies with us in what will be a very difficult operation in Iraq is essential because if we learned anything from Vietnam, we learned the danger of over-extension.

A colleague of mine, Townsend Hoopes (ph), once wrote a book called "The Limits of Intervention." There are limits to American power, and we have to be careful how we use that power and make sure that when we use it, we can accomplish our goals.

O'BRIEN: Let me ask you a hypothetical that might be difficult. I hate to put you on the spot on this one, but...

BRINKLEY: OK.

O'BRIEN: ... but the perception out there is that the U.S. doesn't get involved in conflicts until somebody provokes it, one way or another. And there's a fair amount of revisionist history out there that perhaps Roosevelt might have seen the warning signs of Pearl Harbor, for example, and might have sort of let that happen.

Could Roosevelt have unilaterally put U.S. troops into World War II absent Pearl Harbor, do you think? And, how would that have changed things?

BRINKLEY: That is a what if history question, which you try to shy away from sometimes, but first off, Franklin Roosevelt of course did not know of Pearl Harbor was going to happen and let our entire fleet get bombed. That would be such a cynical observation on FDR, so these theses and conspiracy theories come up over the years, and as historians, we tend to bat them aside.

With that said, if there was not a Pearl Harbor, FDR had a real selling job to do to the American public and he wasn't quite there yet in December of '41. There's an incremental move to -- with lend/lease -- to loading supplies and war material to Great Britain. There was a clear American -- Anglo-American -- alliance against Hitler's Germany, but it was not clear.

There was a very large group called the American First Committee in the United States that included people ranging from Henry Ford to Charles Lindbergh to U.S. senators like Senator Nigh (ph) and many others -- Senator Wheeler (ph). And these people were very vocal about neutrality. And about staying out of the European conflict or staying out of any troubles in the Pacific until Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor mobilized the entire country, and remember, war was declared on the United States. Japan not only sneaked and bombed us at Pearl Harbor, but Hitler then declared war on the United States, one of his really dumb, fatal moves.

O'BRIEN: All right, and a final question for you. Do you think that the lessons of history are being examined as this decision is being made, as this debate unfolds? Are people really paying much attention to the prologue?

BRINKLEY: Well, I'm -- the thing that concerns me is because we all love this country so much, and after September 11's tragedy that we're feeling that we want to first be pro-American, we first saw all the flags and -- oh, you hardly see a politician any more without the American flag on their lapel. It's American is Number One, and we're great and we're unified. But, we have to be careful of overreach, of over extension to really make sure that we can accomplish what we set out to do.

I think we have moral justification in a case of Iraq, meaning that we all know Saddam Hussein's a bad guy and he has broke these U.N. resolutions but I do think it's essential to mobilize global opinion behind us so we don't find ourselves stuck like some Trojan Horse in the middle of Iraq not knowing clearly how to nation build. It's a very big task.

And I think traditionally we've tried two things -- there was an article in the "New York Times" yesterday about smaller wars like Grenada and how we -- before we've been attacked, we did something in Grenada or we blockaded Cuba. The Cuban missile crisis, or we sent Marines in, in 1965, into the Dominican Republic. Those were in our hemisphere.

We are going thousands of thousands of miles away into a very alien culture if we're going to not just do bomb strikes, if we're actually going to commit hundreds of thousands of ground troops, it is a momentous decision and I think we really need to have the support of the world if not to wipe out Saddam Hussein's regime but to nation build properly in Iraq. We're going to need help.

O'BRIEN: All right. Douglas Brinkley, please don't go too far. We'll buy you a cup of coffee, maybe some eggs, there.

And come back to us in about an hour and a half's time or so, when you will be a part of our "Reporter's Notebook."

Wam@cnn.com is the place to send your questions or comments for Professor Brinkley. Also, General Wesley Clark and Jane Arraf from Baghdad are going to be talking about Iraq in just a little bit. We want you to participate. Doug Brinkley, thank you very much. We'll see you in a bit.

BRINKLEY: Thank you.

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 October 5, 2002 - 07:33   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 winds of war may be upon us, and as the president prepares to address the nation Monday night about the situation in Iraq, we thought it might be worth looking at some historical parallels and look at the intersection of politics, the presidency, and war and how all three become intertwined and how all three can define a presidency.
For that we turn to Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian of great note. His latest book is "The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today." The book is co- authored by another well-known historian by the name of Stephen Ambrose.

Mr. Brinkley, good to have you with us.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: Well, good morning. Thanks for having me.

O'BRIEN: All right, let's talk about historical parallels. When you think of presidents, in George W. Bush's decision -- as you look back in the historical record, what president comes to mind when you think of an apt analogy?

BRINKLEY: Harry Truman comes to mind immediately, because Truman came in with very low expectations, was met with numerous crises, mainly ending the second World War by dropping the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But, then, had to forge, if you'd like, two different wars. A larger war, which is called the Cold War, and he had to create the new national security state -- creating the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, the Department of Defense -- you know -- the Air Force Department, CIA -- all came under Truman's national security umbrella, all to defeat this kind of world -- ugly world -- trend called communism.

And he became the leader of the anti-communist crusade. In that anti-communist crusade he had the Korean War.

And here's the danger to George W. Bush. Korea really crippled Truman's administration. Although now we look at the Korean War as the war being won; in 1952, Truman did not even run for re-election. He simply stepped aside because the war was so widely unpopular and Dwight Eisenhower came in and won that election over Adlai Stevenson.

And so you see in George W. Bush his trying to build a new Homeland Security, trying to fight this larger war, his war on terrorism all over the globe, at the same time focusing in on Iraq in a very serious way and trying to marshal U.N. support against Iraq the same way Truman had to dealing with North Korea's invasion of South Korea.

O'BRIEN: I suppose the simplistic way to view what happened with Truman in Korea is perhaps it was overreaching a little bit. Is there -- it's probably a little more complex than that, isn't it?

BRINKLEY: It is more complex. I mean, what -- the -- in the Korean situation was, at first, a very clear objective. We were simply going to push North Korea out of South Korea back over the parallel. It was much more like pushing the Iraqis out of Kuwait during the Gulf War.

But, once we achieved that objective, then the thought was this notion of liberating the entire Korean peninsula.

When, hence, China came into play, our forces were unable to do that, and we finally had to -- if you like -- back track to our first policy.

So, these are the problems that I think if I were president, if I were President Bush, I would be looking at Harry Truman very carefully, trying to learn lessons from the Korean War.

And -- you know -- the problem in Iraq is we may be able to go in there with all of our military might, we may be able to land 100,000 or 200,000 troops, we may be able to have regime change and get rid of Saddam Hussein, but what do we do once our troops are there? That's always been the problem of recent wars, particularly Korea and Vietnam, when we're stuck this far away from this hemisphere.

O'BRIEN: I guess it's an understatement to say that wars are make and break propositions for presidents. When you look at George Herbert Walker Bush, Bush Number 41, and you look at his -- what the Persian Gulf War did for him -- it raised his popularity ratings to astonishing highs, and yet, in the end, it wasn't enough. Why not?

BRINKLEY: The economy. It's the issue the Democrats are trying to re-drum up right now, the state of our economy at this moment, with the election coming into play. But, yes, war is a way that immediately that a president's going to be put into.

If the presidency is called an exclusive club, the most exclusive in the exclusive club are wartime presidents, people like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. You're immediately being dealt with a major crisis.

George W. Bush has the possibility to go down as a great president because he's had to deal with this post-9/11 world, to start leading a new crusade, really, against terrorism around the globe, and to go to war, first in Afghanistan to oust al Qaeda which he's been largely successful on, although the nation building part is unclear yet. Now, in Iraq, it's to get rid of Saddam Hussein's regime, a harder task, and if he accomplishes that and can somehow start a new more Democratic Iraq, which is a very large order, he will go down as a very, very important president. But the dangers of having something go wrong, of us being stuck in Iraq, of a thousand things that could go haywire in the Middle East, could really undermine his presidency as it undermined Harry Truman, so he was unable to run for reelection in '52 and it also undermined Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

Remember, LBJ did not seek reelection; he stepped aside because Vietnam had had him -- our country, and his administration -- in such a quagmire.

O'BRIEN: Now, Vietnam brought down Lyndon Baines Johnson and as we look back on that, it was probably accurate to say that the people in Washington were not taking an honest look at what was really happening in Vietnam. Do you have the sense that those lessons remain learned lessons in Washington and that there will be an honest and frank appraisal of how this war on terrorism is going, whatever front it might lead us to?

BRINKLEY: That's a very good question. I don't know. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution -- only two senators dissented which really got us involved with the Vietnam War. When Johnson escalated the troops, nobody wanted to be perceived as being anti-communist, so many senators, who later regretted their votes.

I think what's important now is that each person in the senate, each person in Congress, anybody on the political landscape today, tries to put aside partisan politics and analyze the global situation and come up with what they think in their heart of hearts is best for the interest of the United States.

And, so, I think a debate over Iraq is important and I also think this effort to go through the United Nations and try to get allies with us in what will be a very difficult operation in Iraq is essential because if we learned anything from Vietnam, we learned the danger of over-extension.

A colleague of mine, Townsend Hoopes (ph), once wrote a book called "The Limits of Intervention." There are limits to American power, and we have to be careful how we use that power and make sure that when we use it, we can accomplish our goals.

O'BRIEN: Let me ask you a hypothetical that might be difficult. I hate to put you on the spot on this one, but...

BRINKLEY: OK.

O'BRIEN: ... but the perception out there is that the U.S. doesn't get involved in conflicts until somebody provokes it, one way or another. And there's a fair amount of revisionist history out there that perhaps Roosevelt might have seen the warning signs of Pearl Harbor, for example, and might have sort of let that happen.

Could Roosevelt have unilaterally put U.S. troops into World War II absent Pearl Harbor, do you think? And, how would that have changed things?

BRINKLEY: That is a what if history question, which you try to shy away from sometimes, but first off, Franklin Roosevelt of course did not know of Pearl Harbor was going to happen and let our entire fleet get bombed. That would be such a cynical observation on FDR, so these theses and conspiracy theories come up over the years, and as historians, we tend to bat them aside.

With that said, if there was not a Pearl Harbor, FDR had a real selling job to do to the American public and he wasn't quite there yet in December of '41. There's an incremental move to -- with lend/lease -- to loading supplies and war material to Great Britain. There was a clear American -- Anglo-American -- alliance against Hitler's Germany, but it was not clear.

There was a very large group called the American First Committee in the United States that included people ranging from Henry Ford to Charles Lindbergh to U.S. senators like Senator Nigh (ph) and many others -- Senator Wheeler (ph). And these people were very vocal about neutrality. And about staying out of the European conflict or staying out of any troubles in the Pacific until Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor mobilized the entire country, and remember, war was declared on the United States. Japan not only sneaked and bombed us at Pearl Harbor, but Hitler then declared war on the United States, one of his really dumb, fatal moves.

O'BRIEN: All right, and a final question for you. Do you think that the lessons of history are being examined as this decision is being made, as this debate unfolds? Are people really paying much attention to the prologue?

BRINKLEY: Well, I'm -- the thing that concerns me is because we all love this country so much, and after September 11's tragedy that we're feeling that we want to first be pro-American, we first saw all the flags and -- oh, you hardly see a politician any more without the American flag on their lapel. It's American is Number One, and we're great and we're unified. But, we have to be careful of overreach, of over extension to really make sure that we can accomplish what we set out to do.

I think we have moral justification in a case of Iraq, meaning that we all know Saddam Hussein's a bad guy and he has broke these U.N. resolutions but I do think it's essential to mobilize global opinion behind us so we don't find ourselves stuck like some Trojan Horse in the middle of Iraq not knowing clearly how to nation build. It's a very big task.

And I think traditionally we've tried two things -- there was an article in the "New York Times" yesterday about smaller wars like Grenada and how we -- before we've been attacked, we did something in Grenada or we blockaded Cuba. The Cuban missile crisis, or we sent Marines in, in 1965, into the Dominican Republic. Those were in our hemisphere.

We are going thousands of thousands of miles away into a very alien culture if we're going to not just do bomb strikes, if we're actually going to commit hundreds of thousands of ground troops, it is a momentous decision and I think we really need to have the support of the world if not to wipe out Saddam Hussein's regime but to nation build properly in Iraq. We're going to need help.

O'BRIEN: All right. Douglas Brinkley, please don't go too far. We'll buy you a cup of coffee, maybe some eggs, there.

And come back to us in about an hour and a half's time or so, when you will be a part of our "Reporter's Notebook."

Wam@cnn.com is the place to send your questions or comments for Professor Brinkley. Also, General Wesley Clark and Jane Arraf from Baghdad are going to be talking about Iraq in just a little bit. We want you to participate. Doug Brinkley, thank you very much. We'll see you in a bit.

BRINKLEY: Thank you.

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