Rick Atkinson traces his military history career from covering the 1991 Gulf War’s 100-hour ground campaign—where oil geopolitics and Thatcher’s pressure shaped Bush Sr.’s resolve—to embedding with Petraeus in Iraq, exposing WMD intelligence failures. His WWII trilogy reveals Eisenhower’s "Germany-first" strategy, D-Day’s 1,000 U.S. casualties at Omaha Beach, and the Battle of the Bulge’s brutal cost, while his Revolutionary War work dissects Washington’s tactical flaws (Long Island, Valley Forge) and indispensable leadership despite Gates’ Saratoga victory. Atkinson argues the French alliance in 1778 and British inability to reintegrate the colonies made independence inevitable, framing both wars as pivotal tests of civilian-military collaboration. [Automatically generated summary]
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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 Rubenstein.
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.
unidentified
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He 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.
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 storied 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.
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.
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.
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 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, you have 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?
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?
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.
Well, there was a ferocious debate over where to strike back first.
The decision was made early on, as 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 and 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.
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.
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 purloined shoes from Paris.
And so he's back in Germany when the invasion ended.
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 France.
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 have 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?
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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, the papers of George Germain, the American secretary, the Robert McNamara of the war, they're all in Ann Arbor.
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.
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 Virgin, and the rest of the French court that you really want to do this.
Yorktown, the defeat of Cornwallis's 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, as Maria Ron knows well, from Mexico South.
And they say, we don't want those revolutionary rascals giving ideas to our colonies.
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?
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?
I think if I knew then what I know now I there would be some tweaks to it, but not substantively.
Okay, here we are in the vault of the National Archives.
What are we going to see?
unidentified
This is one of the first two treaties between us and France during the Revolution.
So this is the Treaty of Alliance.
Wow.
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 treaties.
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.
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.
unidentified
So this is February 6th, 1778, as we went as well as this word of this reaches Washington at Valley Forge.
He graduates kind of in 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.
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.
There's a lot of things that Congress fights about, that they disagree on.
We can all watch that on C-SPAN.
unidentified
Millions of people across the country tuned into C-SPAN.
That was a make-for-C-SPAN moment.
If you watch on C-SPAN, you're going to see me physically across the aisle every day, just trying to build relationships and try to understand their perspective and find common ground.
And welcome forward to everybody watching at home.
Over the past 36 hours, the United States and its partners have launched Operation Epic Fury, one of the largest, most complex, most overwhelming military offensives the world has ever seen.