Rick Atkinson traces his military history obsession from his Army brat upbringing, detailing how his Pulitzer-winning works—like the WWII trilogy—expose Eisenhower’s leadership gaps and Allied miscalculations, such as the Gulf War’s oil-driven intervention or Iraq’s WMD deception. His Revolutionary War trilogy reveals Washington’s tactical flaws (e.g., Long Island 1776) and France’s pivotal 1778 alliance, while questioning whether Britain lost the peace despite battlefield dominance. Atkinson credits ordinary soldiers over generals, contrasts Washington’s enslavement legacy with Eisenhower’s post-war moral reckoning, and dismisses writer’s block as irrelevant to his disciplined research-driven process. [Automatically generated summary]
An issue and you allow people to make up their own minds.
I absolutely love C-SPAN.
I love to hear both sides.
I've watched C-SPAN every morning and it is unbiased.
And you bring in factual information for the callers to understand where they are in their comments.
This is probably the only place that we can hear honest opinion of Americans across the country.
You guys at C-SPAN are doing such a wonderful job of allowing free exchange of ideas without a lot of interruptions.
Thank you, C-SPAN, for being a light in the dark.
C-SPAN's America's Book Club Programming is brought to you by the cable, satellite, and streaming companies that provide C-SPAN as a public service and is supported by the Ford Foundation.
From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein.
As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
Now from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, author of in-depth Revolutionary War and World War II trilogies, and whose other books include The Long Gray Line, Crusade, And in the company of soldiers, Rick Atkinson.
Growing Up on Army Post00:06:00
So I'm very pleased to be in conversation with the author Rick Atkinson at the National Archives.
And I'm very pleased to interview a person who's written about so many different things in so many different forms.
You were a journalist, now you're an author, and you won the Pulitzer Prize as a journalist, and you won the Pulitzer Prize as an author, which is very rare.
And you've become, I would say, the leading expert in the United States in writing about the military.
How did you actually get involved with that?
Did you say you don't like private equity?
You don't like other things?
Why did you write about the military?
I do like private equity.
And thank you for your wonderful support for history and historians, David.
I'm an Army brat.
I grew up in the military.
My father enlisted in the Army in 1942 when he turned 18.
He came back from Europe in 1946.
He went to Penn State and he went back into the Army because he liked it.
And so I grew up on Army Post.
I knew the culture.
I knew the lingo.
I knew the acronyms.
I was always interested in it.
So when I became a professional writer, particularly when I went to the Washington Post, writing about military things was a fairly natural move.
As a young man, you're in high school.
You got accepted at West Point.
I did.
So why did you decide not to go to West Point?
You know, I was a 17-year-old idiot across the river in Fairfax County.
My dad had been in Vietnam and had come back when I was a junior in high school to the Pentagon.
And I'd always thought, well, I'll just go to West Point.
And my dad was not a West Pointer, but it just seemed like the path of least resistance.
And, you know, I was almost ready to get on the bus.
I had an appointment to the class of 1974, which happens to be the class of David Petraeus.
And I began to think about it.
First of all, everybody at West Point was male then.
That seemed like zero fun.
Everybody got a BS in engineering.
That was not my long suit.
And it's the middle of the Vietnam War.
This is April, May of 1970.
Kent State happened right then.
So I just decided that it wasn't right for me.
I hadn't really, I didn't have a plan B, but I knew that I didn't want to go to West Point.
All right, so you went to East Carolina, got a degree, and then you got a graduate degree at University of Chicago.
Right.
And then you became a journalist.
Did you go first in Kansas City?
Was that where you were first?
I actually started on a small paper in southeast Kansas, Pittsburgh, Kansas.
Okay, and then eventually you went to a bigger city in Kansas.
In Missouri.
Yes, I went to the Kansas City Times in Kansas City, Missouri.
And you won a Pulitzer Prize for your work on a Hyatt Bridge collapse that happened there?
No, the paper won the same year, 1982, and I'd had a small role in covering the Hyatt Hotel collapse that killed 118 people.
But I won for national reporting, and it was for a series on the West Point class of 1966, and then some other writing that I had done.
It was a body of work.
Okay, so you're doing very well there.
You're winning a Pulitzer Prize.
Why did you decide to leave and go to the Washington Post?
Because the Washington Post agreed to hire me.
You know, I had gone to high school here.
I love this city.
I've been here now for a long time.
The Post hired me onto the national desk, which was pretty unusual.
Usually I had to start in the shark tank with the Metro staff.
And I knew it was an opportunity to be a big league reporter in a way that I couldn't do in Kansas City.
Right, so you covered many things, including eventually the military.
But you also had time to write two books while you were at the Post.
Talk about those for a moment.
The first book was a book about the class of 66 at West Point, which you had earlier written about as a journalist.
What's so exciting about the class of 66?
Well, they had more men killed, and it's all men still at West Point for the class of 66.
They had more men killed in Vietnam than any other class.
30 of them were killed.
They had gone to West Point as new cadets in 1962 as leaders of their generation, determined to, you know, fight our wars and come home to ticker tape as their fathers had in World War II.
Instead, they end up fighting in Vietnam almost to a man.
There were 579 in that class.
All but three of them went to Vietnam, and some of them multiple times.
And they come back from Vietnam and they're no longer leaders of their generation, but they're pariahs.
And they're dealing with that, grappling with that.
And then their subsequent life, whether they stayed in the military or not, proved to be extraordinarily interesting.
For example, right down the street here, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the wall, designed by Maya Lin, it's built by Jack Wheeler, who is the chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.
He's the guy who got it done.
He had the big Rolodex.
He could raise the money and so on.
And the most ardent opponent of Maya Lin's design had been in Jack's company at West Point, Tom Carhart.
He called it a black gash of shame, an open urinal.
So these two guys, who had been as close as you can possibly get as fellow cadets, loathe each other over how to honor the dead.
So that's a pretty good story, and that's part of the arc of their story.
Any four-star generals come out of the class?
A guy named Wes Clark graduated first in that class.
Rhodes Scholar, first in his class, later became Supreme Allied Commander, among other things.
That's right.
The Kuwait War Conflict00:15:00
So you later wrote stories as a journalist about the now called the Kuwait War, the First Persian Gulf War, and then you wrote a book about it.
That war was over in 100 hours, more or less.
But did we expect it would be over that quickly?
And why were we so surprised that it went so quickly?
It's funny you raise it because there's another memorial being built in Washington now.
It's going to be dedicated in October to the Persian Gulf War.
The shooting part of it, the ground part of it was 100 hours, but the whole war started with Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, August 2nd, 1990.
And then, as you all will remember, a big run-up to it where the United States is moving ultimately more than half a million men and women into that region, primarily Saudi Arabia, and organizing this amazing coalition, including the Syrians, the Russians, people that are not normally our allies.
The air campaign began in the middle of January, and that went on until the end of February.
And then the ground attack where forces go into southern Iraq and swing around and liberate Kuwait.
So no, they didn't know that it was going to be over that quickly.
They thought casualties would be in the hundreds, at least the thousands, or if not the thousands.
I think 148 were killed, about 400 others wounded.
It was a very relatively bloodless war.
Now, initially, President Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, said this will not stand, but it wasn't immediately clear a couple days afterwards, the invasion, that we were actually going to send troops over there.
What propelled him to do that?
Was it Margaret Thatcher that said you've got to stiffen up your back, or did he really decide we've got to get rid of Saddam Hussein?
I think Prime Minister Thatcher was helpful in stiffening his back, but he was pretty resolute from the beginning.
He knew, first of all, there are 100 billion barrels of oil in Kuwait.
Saddam already controlled a substantial portion of the world's oil in Iraq.
And if he got 100 billion more, I think it's about 6% of the world's oil fields, he's right there on the doorstep of Saudi Arabia.
So, you know, the war was largely about oil and benign monarchies, but it was also about the notion that you just cannot allow an aggressor to run in and gobble up a neighboring country.
So after the war was over, President Bush got more questions than about anything else he did while he was president about why he didn't go into Baghdad and get rid of Saddam Hussein.
And what was the reason he didn't go into Baghdad and get rid of Saddam Hussein in that war?
Mainly because Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told him he didn't want to, thought it was not a good idea.
The 100 hours of the ground war have absolutely obliterated the Iraqi army in southern Iraq.
There are CNN photos coming back of the so-called highway of death leading out of Basra in southern Iraq, showing just mile after mile of destruction and death.
American pilots were lacerating these retreating Iraqis.
Powell felt that we had done our job.
We had liberated Kuwait.
The idea of going to Baghdad, Baghdad is a long way from Kuwait.
It wasn't clear that the other Arab nations who were supporting us at the time would agree to this.
It wasn't clear that Saddam had not been neutered.
They figured perhaps it would be a coup that removed him from office.
And that had not been part of the deal when this coalition was put together, that we're actually going to go for regime change in Iraq.
So you subsequently covered for the Washington Post the Second Gulf War, you could call it the Second Gulf War, when the United States invaded Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein.
And then you were covering General Petraeus when he was leading the effort to do part of the military effort there.
What was that like?
Were you embedded with him at that point?
I was.
I was between books.
Don Graham, the former owner of the Washington Post, over breakfast one day, it was December of 2002, said, you know, if you don't have anything else on your mind, why don't you go to Iraq for us or go to Kuwait with the idea that we're going into Iraq?
I knew Petraeus from the time he was a major.
We're both a week apart in age.
I knew him very slightly socially.
He had just taken command of the story 101st Airborne Division, never been in combat before.
He missed the first Gulf War.
So I called him up and I said, I'm general shopping.
Can I go with you if the 101st is deployed?
And Petraeus, being Petraeus, said, sure, come on, come with me.
So what did you say to your wife, who was here, that I'm going over to the war and be embedded with the military?
What did she think about that?
What did you think about that?
You know, I'd been in bad places before.
I'd been to Somalia three times, a much more dangerous place, frankly.
I'd been to Bosnia twice.
So it's just part of the job.
It's what I do.
And, you know, frankly, I've got 16,000 paratroopers around me, and I'm standing next to the commanding general every day for two months.
That's a pretty safe place to be.
Okay, so you wrote a book about that as well.
I did, a book called In the Company of Soldiers.
It was really a leadership study about Petraeus and the 101st in this invasion.
I went with them all the way up the western flank of the Euphrates River, liberating these Shiite towns like Karbala and into Baghdad.
Now, why did the United States decide to invade Iraq then?
We thought they had weapons of mass destruction.
That turned out to be a gigantic intelligence failure.
Correct.
Did the troops, when they were fighting this, realizing there was no weapons of mass destruction there, feel that they were risking their lives for no real purpose?
You know, it's hard to generalize about soldiers like any group of people.
I think there was a sense of disappointment.
We had been sold a bill of goods.
You can remember that George Tennant, who was head of the CIA, said it's a slam dunk that Saddam is harboring substantial supplies of chemical and possibly biological weapons.
He has nuclear aspirations.
All that was not true, as it turned out.
And I can remember as we approached Baghdad and there would be these teams out looking for these fabled weapons and reporting back, we got nothing for you here.
And there was a sense of deflation.
Soldiers do what they're told to do, and they're not going to go to the commanding general and say, hey, we got sold a bill of goods.
So in 1999, you say, I've been a journalist for a while, but now I'm going to be a full-time book author.
What prompted you to say I want to write books full-time and not cover stories on a daily basis?
Yeah, I'd come back from Berlin where I'd been the bureau chief, and I ran investigative reporting at the Washington Post.
I love the Washington Post.
I love the people who worked there.
I love the people who attracted.
But for one thing, it's, I think, a young man's profession.
And I wanted the opportunity to find a narrative voice that I thought I had, having written two books already, where I could really stretch out and try to accomplish something as a narrative historian.
Okay, so you decided to write a trilogy.
Oh, on World War II.
Wasn't one book enough?
Because when you say you're going to write a trilogy, if you're tired of the subject, after the first book, you've got to write the second and the third.
So, did you ever think maybe you should have just say, I'm going to do one at a time?
Well, maybe I should have talked to you at the time.
You know, I conceived of it right from the beginning as a trilogy because living in Germany and I was there for that endless succession of commemorations of World War II, the 50th anniversary commemorations of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge and the end of the war in Europe.
So I was immersed in it.
And I'd been born in Germany, and again, I'd grown up in the army of the 50s and 60s.
It was very much alive with the memory of World War II.
And I had two small epiphanies.
One was that the great events in American history are bottomless.
People will be writing about Abraham Lincoln 500 years from now.
And even though I was told, you know, there are 60,000 World War II titles on Amazon, what do you got new to say about it?
Well, I have a lot new to say about it.
And the other epiphany was that you could tell the story as a triptych, three panels.
The liberation of Europe starts in North Africa, and then it evolves 100 miles across the Mediterranean to Sicily and Italy.
And then at Normandy, you have the final panel.
And so I thought that lends itself naturally to a great story.
So you went to a publisher, presumably, or your agent did, and said, I have an author who knows something about military matters, and he wants to write a trilogy on World War II.
And did the publisher say, we've always been waiting for a trilogy on World War II and let's get this done?
Yes, actually.
I've had the same editor and the same agent who's here, Rafe Segallen, and the same editor, John Sterling, for all books.
We've been a trio since 1986.
And the editor, John Sterling, who had edited those first two books, had just become the president and publisher of Henry Holt.
This is the first deal that he makes as publisher.
And we pitched the concept to him, and he was all in right from the beginning.
All right, so the first volume is about North Africa and the victory there.
And for those who aren't familiar with it, General Eisenhower is given the task of leading the American troops there, even though he had never been in combat in World War I and had no combat experience.
Why would Eisenhower get the job of leading the American troops and the United Allied troops in Northern Africa?
Why did he get that job?
He got the job in part because the only other obvious candidate was George Marshall and George Marshall as chief of staff of the Army, and he became chief of staff on September 1st, 1939, the day World War II began, was in Franklin Roosevelt's estimation absolutely indispensable here in Washington.
Eisenhower had been in London as sort of the chief army representative coordinating with the Brits before we even get into the war.
The Brits liked him.
The Brits thought they could control him secretly.
He did not share the extraordinary anglophobia that was rampant throughout almost the entire upper echelon of the United States Army.
They loathed the British, and that includes Patton, Omar Bradley.
It's a long list.
Eisenhower, small town Kansas kid, he kind of likes him.
He begins using words like petrel and tiffin and other British slang.
It drives Patton insane.
So he was there in Britain.
He had a relationship with the Brits.
Roosevelt knew him slightly, liked him, and most important of all, George Marshall recommended him.
So for those who haven't read the book yet, and no doubt they should read the book, right?
Oh, of course.
Those who haven't read the book yet, why did we care about Northern Africa in terms of World War II?
I mean, the Germans had invaded Europe, they had invaded as much Northern Africa, and we weren't really involved that much in Northern Africa.
Why were we so focused on getting Northern Africa resolved before we actually went into Europe?
Well, there was a ferocious debate over where to strike back first.
The decision was made early on.
It was the most important decision of the war, made by Eisenhower and Churchill, the Germany-first decision.
The realization was that Germany was the strongest of the Axis powers, including Italy and Japan.
And if you can defeat Germany, the others will fall like rotten apples from the tree.
That was the right strategic decision.
So if you're going to attack the Germans, where are you going to do it?
The American Brain Trust at the Pentagon, which was being built in 1942, basically says, well, obviously, we're going to stage in Britain, we're going to cross the English Channel, and we're going to attack in France.
The Germans have occupied France since 1940.
Churchill says, that's a really bad idea.
The Germans are much tougher than you think they are.
You've got a green army with green commanders.
This is going to take a while.
And a good place to start is North Africa.
Why?
There are no Germans there.
The North African colonies of France, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, are controlled only by Vichy French troops.
Roosevelt is persuaded.
And Roosevelt signs the order in July 1942.
He signs the order that we will go to North Africa.
He signs it.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Commander-in-Chief.
That document is probably in the vault here.
We should go ask for it.
Lest there be any doubt about whence his authority came from.
And so Eisenhower wrote in his diary, this is the blackest day in history because we're going to Africa, not into France.
He had no combat experience.
He had no combat.
He had missed World War I.
He and Omar Bradley had both not been in combat.
People forget that at the age of 42, Eisenhower was a colonel in the military doing training exercises, and then later he becomes, not too much longer after that, the Supreme Allied Commander.
It's amazing a scent from a younger friend.
He goes from lieutenant colonel to five-star general in 42 months.
It's a promotion every six months.
So he did pretty well in Northern Africa, and they say, well, okay, are we ready to go invade Europe now from England and go into France?
And they say, no, we have to go to Italy first.
Why do they want to go to Italy?
Partly because once you're committed to North Africa, you're committed to the Mediterranean.
And you've got ultimately a million troops in North Africa.
It's a big aircraft carrier basically for staging, for invading from the south.
You can go 100 miles to Sicily.
That is really a big aircraft carrier.
You can use that for the overwhelming bombing campaign that you're going to be launching.
And then it's only two miles across the Straits of Messina into the toe of the boot of Italy.
So we won in Italy.
It took a while.
It was much more complicated than we might have thought.
June 5th Invasion00:16:17
So Eisenhower gets credit for the successful victory.
And then does he say, okay, I'm ready to invade Europe and I want the job of being in charge of invading Europe?
Or was George Marshall really wanted that job?
Well, first, the Italian campaign is going to go on until May of 1945.
It's going to be awful to the end because you're slugging your way up the Apennines in winter after winter, as it turns out.
But Eisenhower is sent back to Britain to prepare for the invasion that's going to be launched, as it turns out, on June 6, 1944.
George Marshall believes that he is going to be ultimately made the Supreme Allied Commander.
And once again, Roosevelt basically says, I can't stand the thought of you not being in Washington.
Marshall never, to my knowledge, utters a single word of complaint about it.
He basically says, yes, sir, whatever you say, sir.
And Eisenhower is naturally the man to then step in.
All right, so Eisenhower then has how many months to organize the troops and get ready for the invasion?
Was it a year, six months?
How long did he have before he could really be ready to invade?
Well, they've been organizing since 1942 in some ways because there have been lots of American troops that have been coming over.
They've been coming over on the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth.
Those ships could each carry a division, each 15,000 soldiers.
Those ships could each outrun German submarines.
So that buildup had been going on before Eisenhower got back there from the Mediterranean.
The decision is to invade is in June of 1944.
And originally the decision was going to invade on June the 5th.
Correct.
Why didn't they invade in June the 5th?
Bad weather.
There was a summer storm, a ferocious storm, actually.
And there were certain conditions, meteorological conditions that you had to have.
You had to have a certain amount of light from the moon.
Winds could not be above a certain level because you're dropping three divisions of paratroopers into Normandy.
And high winds are perilous to paratroopers.
There were high waves that would have swamped landing craft.
So Eisenhower makes a decision to postpone.
Did they already start the invasion?
Were some of the ships already moving?
Yeah, some of the ships were moving.
They were moving out toward the English Channel from ports all over southern England, and they were recalled.
You know, it's a pretty late decision that he makes to cancel.
All right, so June the 6th turns out to be the day.
It was supposed to be June the 5th.
And Eisenhower writes a note, I guess to himself, probably, saying, if this doesn't work, I deserve the blame.
And so it's a note that would be issued if the June 6th invasion didn't work.
What's the essence of that note?
And did he ever make it public at the time?
No, and he had done it before, before previous invasions.
Basically, I alone am responsible for the failure of what happened to North Africa, Sicily.
He writes this note and he folds it up and puts it in his wallet.
He did not disclose it at the time, but it's a testament to his character that he's ready to take the spear in the chest if things go bad.
Now, the invasion doesn't go so well initially.
The Germans are not unprepared, but it turns out, as you write, that Hitler is asleep when the invasion occurs and nobody wants to wake him up.
Had they woken him up and had he moved troops around, would the invasion have failed?
No, probably not.
They were a little slow afoot.
They were deceived about where the invasion was going.
They knew that an invasion was coming.
There was no doubt about that.
But there had been a very deft deception plan, organized mainly by the Brits, who were geniuses at deception.
And the Brits thought that if you could fool them into thinking they're coming at the Pas de Calais, which is the closest point between Britain and France, they'll put a lot of their defensive resources there.
And they did.
The commander of that whole sector along the Atlantic Wall was Erwin Rommel, who had been in Africa earlier.
Rommel didn't, Rommel had gone home for his wife's birthday.
He'd taken her a pair of purloin shoes from Paris.
And so he's back in Germany when the invasion.
And so he goes racing back.
You know, they fought ferociously, and they moved armored units toward the beachhead in Normandy.
And it's going to take until late in August before the breakout occurs in Normandy and they begin to really push across front.
Those men who went on to the beach of Normandy, what was the fatality rate?
I assume a very large number of them were killed on that June 6th, June 7th period of time.
There were more than 1,000 killed on June 6th.
And the total casualties in those first few days was more than 10,000 casualties, killed and wounded.
The casualties were especially bad on Omaha Beach.
You've seen pictures.
If you've seen the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, the first 22 minutes of that film captures the high-intensity bloodbath on Omaha Beach as well as anything that's ever been done.
On the 40th anniversary of the invasion, President Reagan spoke at Point de Hawk, which is a very difficult place that the American soldiers had to climb up with machine guns shooting down at them.
And they actually captured Point de Hawk.
And was that a very important victory for the Allies at that particular time?
It's part of the Omaha Beach complex.
And Point de Hawk is a 100-foot cliff.
There are Rangers using grappling hooks, and Germans are throwing grenades over, and they're firing down on them.
You know, it requires extraordinary courage and tenacity and skill.
But that's part of the whole effort to push the Germans back away from Omaha Beach, which happens by noon on June 6th.
The invasion at Omaha Beach is in the balance for about five hours.
The other four beaches are going pretty well.
There are casualties, quite a few casualties on the British beaches, but for the most part, the day is won by sunset on June 6th.
So we win eventually.
The Allies win.
They move the Germans back, and we say, okay, the war is pretty much over.
But what happens to the Germans?
They decide to fight again and the Battle of the Bulge arises.
Can you explain what the Battle of the Bulge is?
Yeah, well, after we break out of Normandy and German resistance is essentially eradicated in Normandy, and then things move much quicker.
Patton takes command of the Third Army.
Omar Bradley is the senior commander of American forces there.
Bernard Montgomery, the commander of British forces.
And they're racing across, and they liberate Paris August 25th.
And then it's a race toward the German border, basically, a race toward the Ardennes, at least, Belgium, Luxembourg, leading into Germany.
And German resistance then stiffens.
And what we find, the Battle of the Bulge begins in the middle of December 1944.
It's a counteroffensive ordered by Hitler against the advice of his senior generals in an effort to smash the Allied front, particularly the Americans in Belgium and Luxembourg, and drive toward Antwerp, which is the biggest port and it's a critical port for supplying these hundreds of thousands of soldiers there.
And it failed.
But it goes on until late January.
Did we lose more American troops and Allied troops in the Battle of Bulge than in the Normandy invasion?
Yes.
Yeah.
It was, you know, it's brutal midwinter weather.
Air power, which the Americans and British have in spades, is largely useless initially because it's very cloudy.
So it's pretty awful.
So Eisenauer eventually joins his troops and he discovers with his troops the concentration camps.
How did he react to those concentration camps and what did he do to make sure people wouldn't say later on that that was a myth?
Yeah, you know, there was no secret that there were death camps.
Treblinka had been liberated by the Russians.
The Allied forces in the West had liberated some smaller camps, but it's really when you get to those death camps like Buchenwald in Germany.
And Eisenhower and Omar Bradley and Patton together go through one of them, and they're really shocked by what they see, the emaciated dead, the living dead, the utter carnage, the depravity of it.
And they're shocked and appalled and really angry.
And one of the things Eisenhower does is he orders local townspeople to walk through.
You will come and look at this.
Look at what you've done.
And then he made certain that there were film crews there.
News footage was sent back to the United States all around the world.
And for the first time, people are seeing with their own eyes what has happened.
Now, who would you say is the person most responsible for the successful World War II victory of the Allies?
Would it be Winston Churchill, FDR, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, or just the average GI?
Well, you know, there's 16.4 million Americans in uniform in a country of 130 million.
The American Army grows from 190,000 in 1938 to 8 million.
I'll give it to the average GI, sailor, airman, Marine.
Franklin Roosevelt is the greatest soldier of the war, and he never hears a shot fired in anger.
He makes a lot of very difficult decisions.
And he is the leader of the alliance.
He's the one who's basically relying on George Marshall.
He's making a lot of tough decisions.
And he's making a lot of tough decisions against the advice of his senior commanders, like the decision to go to Africa.
So you finish a trilogy, the first volume of which won the Pulitzer Prize.
And then you say, I love trilogies.
I'm going to do another trilogy.
And so did anybody say, you know, they're hard to do and takes a long time.
You didn't, nobody said that to you?
Well, once again, I should have talked to you.
So you decided to write a trilogy on the Revolutionary War.
And the first volume of which took you how long to write that one?
Six years.
Six years.
And that is basically, to put everything in context, how many battles were there in the Revolutionary War?
Oh, you know, including small skirmishes, there are several hundred.
But I thought there was like something like 21, 22 maybe.
There's a couple dozen that we would think of as battles.
Of those, did the Americans lose more than they won?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
They won very few, actually.
You know, my thinking was, 2013 is when the third and final volume of the World War II series came out.
And even before that was published, I'm thinking about what to do next.
And I kept thinking of Jack London's advice that a writer ought not sit back and wait for inspiration, but should light out after it with a club.
And I took my club, and what I found was a story that has captivated me since I was a kid.
It's our foundation story.
It's where we came from.
It's our origin myth.
And so that's why I turned to the American Revolution.
Okay, so could we have won that war if anybody other than George Washington was our general?
You know, he's proverbially the indispensable man, and sometimes proverbs can be true.
And I think he really is.
He's not a particularly good tactical commander.
He loses battles he should not have lost.
Long Island, for example, in August 1776.
It's the biggest battle of the American Revolution in terms of number of soldiers involved.
This is a guy who'd made a living as a surveyor.
You would think that he would be observant of the land, of the terrain.
He never goes out and does reconnaissance to see that the area near Brooklyn today, where he had his troops deployed, was vulnerable.
And he wakes up in the morning and the British have outflanked him, gone around his left flank, and they are behind him.
That's never good.
He does the same thing at Brandywine in September of 1777.
He doesn't recognize that his right flank this time is vulnerable, and the British outflank him.
And again, they're behind him.
That's really bad.
So he's got deficits as a battlefield commander, but he's got lots of other assets.
Was there an effort to replace him by his own generals as the leading general, or did anybody want to replace him?
During the winter at Valley Forge in 77, 78, which is a grim time, 20 miles west of Philadelphia, the British have occupied Philadelphia.
They're living very comfortably.
2,000 American soldiers die at Valley Forge that year of dysentery, typhus, typhoid.
And there's a lot of grumbling about is Washington the right guy for the job?
There has been a stellar American victory at Saratoga.
Washington is not the commander there.
Horatio Gates, a former British Army officer who had emigrated to America, is the commander.
And the principal battlefield leader at both battles at Saratoga is a major general named Benedict Arnold.
And so there is some, there's grumbling, there's whispering about Washington.
He's a knife fighter.
And if you're going to take him down, you better take him down because he counterpunched very effectively.
He has strong support in Congress, so it goes nowhere.
Washington had some combat experience in the French and Indian Wars, and that was probably more than many Americans had.
He had some combat experience, but he was working for the British then.
Yes.
But when the Continental Congress occurs, the Second Continental Congress, he shows up in a military uniform.
Yes.
Everybody else is wearing civilian garb.
Does that kind of advertising that I want this job?
You think?
That's what some people say.
Yeah, he, you know, he's been out of uniform for 16 years at this point, and he had five years of fairly substantial combat, always under superior British command as a Virginia militia colonel.
But he does come to the Continental Congress.
He's a delegate to Congress from Virginia, and he's wearing his uniform.
And boy, he looks the part.
He's almost 6'3 at a time when the average American male is maybe 5'7.
Jefferson said he's the greatest horseman of his age.
He looks fantastic on a horse.
He is a commanding presence.
And he's advertising for the job.
The only other possible candidate is John Hancock, who would have been a catastrophe.
So your first volume is completed, and now it's now permanently out there as the second volume.
Yes.
And what is it called?
It's called The Fate of the Day.
And what does that mean?
It's a phrase that you hear in the late 18th century several times.
It's uttered by Alexander Hamilton, Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton, who's one of Washington's aides, at the Battle of Monmouth, for example, which is in June of 1778, as that army comes out of Valley Forge.
It's a pretty substantial fight at Monmouth, which starts very badly for the Americans.
And Washington rides to the rescue and really turns the day around.
And Hamilton writes, I never saw the general to such good effect with his stalwart approach just when it was needed.
He saved the fate of the day.
Working on the Third Volume00:06:46
Now, do we have to wait for the third volume to come out to know how the war came out?
Well, they're going to Google it.
You know that.
So when are you now working on third volume?
Yeah, I am working on third volume.
It'll probably take me six years.
The first two did.
Each of the volumes.
What about the trilogy for World War II?
I think it was five years for each of those volumes.
I was younger and faster then.
And when you're doing these trilogies, where do you get all the research?
Let's say for the Revolutionary War, where do you get a lot of the materials?
Well, there are archives all over the country and all over the world.
For World War II, I was out at the National Archives Archives II in College Park for months cumulatively.
Wonderful archives out there.
For this, you know, probably the, I was just out in Pasadena at the Huntington Library, and I was there a couple weeks ago.
I spent a lot of time at the British National Archive.
I was at the British Library last summer.
I'll be there again in a couple weeks.
Probably the best repository of 18th century material is in, of all places, Ann Arbor.
Because there was an industrialist named William Clements.
He made a fortune in Michigan, and he was a collector, and he began buying up the papers of British generals and statesmen from the Revolutionary War period.
So a lot of those papers, the papers, for example, of Henry Clinton, who was the British commander-in-chief longer than any other general, papers of George Germain, the American secretary, the Robert McNamara of the war, they're all in Ann Arbor.
So I go there.
Could the Americans have won that war if the French had not come on our side?
I don't think so.
Certainly not by 1783.
The French are absolutely indispensable.
And we know that the game by 1777 is to persuade the Roman Catholic absolute monarch of France, Louis XVI,
and his beautiful spendthrift Austrian wife Marie Antoinette, known around the French court as Madame Deficit, that the game is to persuade him to do more than supply clandestine gunpowder and muskets and some cash that he's been giving almost from the beginning under the table,
but instead to come in with both feet to provide an army, to provide a navy, to do what needs to be done.
You and I in the vault here at the National Archives saw those two treaties that Franklin.
Franklin is sent.
He's a Septagennarian.
He's sent to France in December.
I think a Septuagenarian isn't so bad.
You and I both know, you know, with age comes wisdom, right?
So he is sent as our first, and as it turns out, our greatest diplomat, to persuade the king and his foreign minister Vergenne and the rest of the French court that you really want to do this.
Now, the Battle of Yorktown, which ends the war, the last battle, major battles, in 1781, why did they battle the war not really end until 1783?
Two more years.
What were they doing for two years, just sitting around waiting for a treaty to be negotiated?
Basically, yes.
Yorktown, the defeat of Cornwallis' army, the capture or destruction of Cornwallis' army at Yorktown in October 1781, ends most of the fighting in America.
There's still skirmishes and there's still people dying over the next year and a half.
But the war has become very complicated.
First of all, it is a civil war here in America.
It is our first civil war and it's as nasty as every civil war.
It is brother against brother.
It's father against son.
And it has become a global war with the French coming into it.
Then the Spanish come into it because they are allied under the Bourbon Brotherhood.
And then the Dutch come into it on our side.
And then there are other countries that are involved, the Russians, the Swedes, and so on, not overtly as part of the alliance, but they're involved.
And so negotiating the treaties is very complex.
There's separate treaties between the Brits.
Also, it has to be said that King George III, your last king, was really resistant to throwing in the towel and drove a hard bargain as hard as he could.
He had a poor hand to deal.
But the negotiations were over things like, should the United States be confined basically to the eastern seaboard?
Or should, as the Americans were demanding, demanding, be allowed to have all the territory to the Mississippi River.
The French and the Spanish secretly were saying, no, don't let them do that.
Spanish at that time owned New Orleans, and they've got an empire of their own.
Maria Rona knows well from Mexico South.
And they say, we don't want those revolutionary rascals giving ideas to our colonies.
The Brits finally say, ah, let them have it.
If the British had had better generals and maybe more appetite for fighting longer, could they have won that war?
They could have won the war.
They could have destroyed the American army.
They could have killed Washington.
I'm not sure they could have won the peace because one thing, the American population, it's 2.5 million when the revolution begins.
500,000 of those 2.5 million are enslaved blacks.
It's doubling in size every 25 years.
It's a rate of growth unseen in European history.
It's four times the rate of growth of Britain.
So we're going to be bigger than they are pretty soon.
Also, by the time we get into 1779, 1780, there's been a lot of killing, and there's a lot of bad feeling.
And it's very hard to put that back in the bottle.
The British are going to have to have a large occupation army here.
There's going to be continual guerrilla warfare.
There's no doubt about that.
I think it's going to be very difficult for the British to feel that they've actually won us back into the empire.
So let's suppose you're president of a country.
Who would you rather have be your general, Eisenhower or Washington fighting a war?
Well, it depends which war.
If you're happy with each of the ones they fought for.
You know, David, I spent 15 years metaphorically with Dwight Eisenhower, and I've now spent 12 with George Washington.
Admiring Great Writers00:05:35
What do you admire more?
I come out of this admiring them both more than when I started.
I recognize their foibles, but I think I know them well as generals and as men.
They're both extraordinary, and they have a lot in common, actually, even though they have nothing in common in terms of their backgrounds.
Who do you admire less than when you started these books?
Well, you know, Bernard Montgomery, who's the senior British commander, is a complete pain in the neck for everybody involved.
He's a guy that Eisenhower was pulling out what little hair he had left.
So for somebody who wants to be the next Rick Atkinson, a person who's a journalist and a bookwriter, an author, Pulitzer Prize winner, what do you recommend?
Going to journalism school, going to some other school, working in a small newspaper for a while?
How do you get to be a writer to get to be at your level?
What would you recommend?
Well, you have to be lucky, first of all.
You know, that's the trait Napoleon most cherished in his generals, and it's important in life.
I think if you want to be a writer, you write.
I started on a paper circulation of 12,000 in southeast Kansas, and I had to write every day or I didn't eat.
And over the course of years as a journalist, I wrote a lot, and not all of it memorable.
But it teaches you a lot about the discipline of writing.
It teaches you about organization.
It teaches you about accuracy.
It teaches you about whether you've really got it.
Some writers writing books say, I write a page a day, two pages a day, and then if I get two pages done, I'm going to do something else.
Some say I write till I drop.
What do you do?
I'm pretty rigorous about it.
First of all, I start by spending six months or so making a big outline.
I go through all my notes, thousands and thousands of pages of notes.
Everything is in a Word document, no stray documents around.
And I use the outlining software in Word, which I think is the greatest invention since the plow.
And I use that to build myself an outline that is a roadmap, shows me where to go.
And when that's done, first of all, it also shows me where everything is in my notes.
And then I, you know, I start writing early in the morning.
I live here in Washington.
My commute is about 15 feet from the bedroom to my office.
And I write till about noon.
I'm an old newspaper guy, so I type fast.
I write about a thousand words a day, typically.
At noon, it starts to turn to garbage.
And I spend the afternoon editing what I have written in the morning, preparing for the next day's writing.
I read it one more time after dinner, and then I'm done with it.
I never go back to it.
Never go back?
I never go back to it.
And I don't rewrite.
When I'm done, I'm done.
Okay, so when you're writing like that, do you ever get writer's block?
No.
Is that because you're a journalist?
You can't afford writer's block when you're a job?
I think so, yeah.
I mean, you know, I have moments where I think, oh, boy, that's not very good.
But no, I never have writer's block.
And what are you most proud of having accomplished in your writing career?
Is it the body of work or is there any one book or one journalist article that you've written?
What are you most proud of having accomplished?
You know, I'm proud to have made a living as a writer since I was 23 years old.
I couldn't have dreamed that when I was a kid.
I love the phases of my life.
I loved working for the Washington Post.
Ben Bradley hired me.
Bob Woodward is my close friend.
These are giants in that field.
So, you know, but I needed to move on, which I did.
And any of your children become journalists or writers?
Oh, they're way too smart for that.
No, one is a lawyer here in town.
He was a senior Justice Department official under the prior regime.
And the other one's a surgeon.
So today, what would you say you want to do after you finish this third volume of this trilogy?
You're going to write another trilogy or just one more volume at a time?
Yeah, what a good idea.
Write another trilogy.
We are having that conversation.
You're talking me out of it now.
You know, if this takes me six years, then you and I will both be octogenarians by then.
And I see baby boomers who won't get off the stage.
And I find it slightly offensive.
And it's not just writers, it's all across the board.
There are a lot of politicians in this town who should have gotten off the stage earlier.
And I don't want to be one of those people.
And I see writers that I admire very much who shouldn't have written those last books.
So what do you think you might do when you're not writing then if your next career is?
I'm thinking private equity.
We need writers of private equity.
Yes, we could use more people like you.
So today, when you look back on what you've written, if you could rewrite anything that you've written, would you rewrite anything, anything you've written, you think maybe you didn't get it quite right, or you're pretty happy with everything?
You know, first of all, I haven't been back and reread those earlier books, and certainly there are things that I wrote as a journalist that would just make me cringe.
But the Long Gray Line, first book that I wrote, I don't know how to write a book.
What do I know about writing it?
Would Rewrite Anything?00:04:58
I think if I knew then what I know now, there would be some tweaks to it, but not substantively.
Now, earlier before we started this discussion, we had a chance to see the Treaty of Paris, the one copy that the United States has.
I guess the British have one as well, maybe the French have one as well.
What was your impression of that?
Had you ever seen the actual original of the Treaty of Paris before?
I had not.
And I'd never seen, you know, we also saw the treaties that the French signed with Franklin's signature on it signed in Paris in 1778.
No, and, you know, I get goosebumps on the back of my hair stands up back here.
So two final questions.
If you could ask Eisenhower anything, what would you like to ask him?
Well, I would not ask if he was having an affair with Kay Summers.
I would not waste my question on that.
You know, I think I would ask him to reflect on his generalship and how it evolved over time.
I would have some very specific questions about decisions that he made.
All right.
If you could ask George Washington any question, what would you want to ask George Washington?
I would ask him, how do you square the circle morally of 577 slaves living at Mount Vernon during your lifetime when you die in December 1799?
Because I think that is one of the, and Jefferson had even more, as you know, at Monticello.
Washington at least freed the ones he owned in his will.
Jefferson freed, what, seven?
So I think that I would have, I would ask him, you know, moral questions.
Well, in Eisenhower's, not, I mean, I'm sorry, in Washington's case, he freed his slaves upon the death of his wife.
Yeah.
So they didn't get freed quite immediately, right?
And if the ones, the few that Jefferson freed, two of them were his sons.
Right.
So, yeah, I mean, it haunts us to this day, doesn't it?
It's the difficulty of all men are created equal.
They're endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.
Well, that doesn't apply to women.
It doesn't apply to Native Americans.
It doesn't apply to indigents.
And it sure as hell doesn't apply to 500,000 enslaved blacks.
That's the great conundrum of that glorious period of our history.
Look, great contribution to our country for writing these books.
And thank you very much for being here today.
And I look forward to reading the third volume of this trilogy and the first volume of your next trilogy.
Okay?
Thank you very much, Rick.
Before the interview, David Rubenstein and Rick Atkinson viewed artifacts inside the vault of the National Archives.
Okay, here we are in the vault of the National Archives.
What are we going to see?
This is one of the first two treaties between us and France during the Revolution.
So this is the Treaty of Alliance.
Well, it was done, as you know, the same day as the Treaty of Amity and Commerce.
So this is the military side of it with the alliance with France saying that they'll come and help us militarily.
And then, so this is, we have two types of trees.
We have what are called American originals that are pre-ratification.
They'll have the signatures of both representatives of the country.
Later, after each country ratifies, they'll then exchange the treaties.
That'll just have the signature of the other nation, and they'll literally exchange it with each nation.
So, this is what we call the American original because it has the French representative with Gerard and then Benjamin representing the U.S., Benjamin Franklin, Silas Dean, and Arthur V. Yeah, which is that time.
Wow.
Wow.
In Paris.
Well, this is the most important thing to happen in the Revolution.
And it's side by side.
As you can see, it's English and French, literally side by side.
And then there's another page under here.
But this is not the Treaty of Paris.
No.
No.
That's 1783.
This is the treaty that Franklin has been working towards from his arrival in France in December of 1776, trying to persuade the Roman Catholic absolute monarch Louis XVI to not just provide clandestine munitions and some money and muskets and so on, but to really provide complete support, a navy, an army.
And so this is the beginning of that next step to a full alliance.
So this is February 6th, 1778, is when it's on this.
And this word of this reaches Washington at Valley Forge.
There's a huge celebration at Valley Forge because they know this is a game changer.
Custer's Appointment00:03:08
So I know you've written a few things on West Point.
So this is West Point related.
So this is from 1856.
This is a congressman in Ohio.
Jefferson Davis happens to be Secretary of War at the time, ironically.
So it's to the Secretary of the War, Secretary of War, and he's representing, he's appointing, recommending George A. Custer to the Military Academy at West Point.
So being the government, they sent a form letter to Custer family to fill out.
So this is George Custer's very flame-buying signature here in 1857.
Since he was under 21, a parent or a guardian at a sign, so this is his dad's signature down here, showing how the form didn't change much.
Someone else that you know well, so this is 1910, Dwight Eisenhower accepting his acceptance at West Point, or appointment rather.
And then his dad, same thing, I'm signing for my son Dwight's signature.
Of course, Custer graduates last in his class.
Jefferson Davis was a West Point graduate.
He graduates kind of the middle of his class, but he's that's and he's gone to West Point not because he wants to be Napoleon, but because it's free.
That's fantastic.
Huh.
I mean, it's almost the exact same form.
1857.
Well, that's West Point for you.
Yeah.
See more with Rick Atkinson in the vault of the National Archives and watch past episodes of America's Book Club at C-SPAN.org/slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
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Tonight, on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A, former New York Democratic U.S. Congressman Steve Israel talks about his novel, The Einstein Conspiracy, inspired by a real Nazi plot to eliminate physicist Albert Einstein in the 1930s.
A vocal critic of Adolf Hitler, Einstein fled to the United States with his wife in 1933 and became a U.S. citizen in 1940.
Nazi Hit on Einstein00:00:20
He had visited the U.S. where he taught, then was set to return to Germany and realized, I can't go back.
Spent time in Belgium.
A Nazi hit squad tried to assassinate him in Belgium, New Belgium.
His wife pled with him not to take his daily walks because there was a $5,000 bounty on his head.