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00:02:13.000Forum conversations today, not focus as much on the breaking news, but focus on our country.
00:02:18.000I think today is really the kickoff of America 250.
00:02:21.000Of course, we had the rededicate event in DC where we're rededicating the nation to our faith and providence and all of those things, and that we would pray that Jesus would continue guiding this country into the future.
00:02:35.000And that's important, but Memorial Day is really the kickoff.
00:04:03.000But, and we talked about this recently, it's really almost like 200, you have to go back almost 230, 230 years when you're understanding the revolution and probably really farther back than that because the colonies governed themselves for 150 years before that, you know, and they created a whole culture.
00:04:20.000You think 150 years, that's a long time to develop a culture and develop, you know, rules and norms and ways of governing oneself as a colonies.
00:04:29.000But take us back, maybe, Patrick, in the lead up.
00:04:33.000Here's a trivia question Who was the first American colonialist?
00:04:37.000To die in what would become the revolution?
00:04:44.000It depends on where you want to go with that because the revolution begins in the mid 1860s.
00:04:58.000And it's here that the colonies go into economic rebellion against the greatest empire of the time in existence, which was the British and the Crown.
00:05:11.000And they wield enormous economic power by boycotting British goods.
00:05:17.000I mean, the real takeaway and why this is important today is the founders understood dependence.
00:05:25.000And if you are dependent on another nation for your livelihood or for the goods that you have in your supply chain, you don't really have any freedom at all.
00:05:34.000And that applies today with China and other places.
00:05:39.000But one of the great aspects of the American Revolution.
00:05:43.000Is the non importation exportation agreement, which was an extension of what they initially did during the Stamp Act, but it begins in 1774.
00:05:52.000But the Revolutionary War is first about economics, but then it's about really ideas.
00:05:59.000And the most important ideas in world history are really founded from the American Revolution the ideas of liberty and freedom, which will shake empires to the core and break them down.
00:06:15.000In the 1770s and really 1773 and 74, there's a massive it's here that the political revolution is really kind of comes to being.
00:06:31.000And it's in 1774, though, in September, on September 1st, if you're familiar with Somerville, Massachusetts, right in Cambridge, right outside of Boston, there's what looks like it to be an old windmill there.
00:06:47.000And that is the old powder magazine that the colonists had in 1774.
00:06:54.000And this is where the kinetic revolutionary war really begins.
00:07:00.000It's General Gage conducts a covert operation to take 200 half casts of black powder away from that magazine.
00:07:41.000And they did it because they knew that black powder was scarce.
00:07:46.000There were weapons laying around from the French and Indian War, but there was hardly any black powder.
00:07:51.000Because production within the colonies had been outsourced to India at the time because it was cheaper, but there are also royal bans on black powder to keep the colonies in check.0.81
00:08:19.000But I guess we have a minute to break here, but if you were to ask, One of those men who descended on Boston Common or who fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, the guys who first joined General Washington's army.
00:08:31.000And you asked them, even before the Declaration of Independence, what do you think they would have said?
00:08:42.000They were fighting for their liberties and freedom.
00:08:46.000And Revolutionary Snipers, which I just finished, is a trilogy of three books on the American Revolutionary War.
00:08:52.000I've spent 16 years of my life writing 14 books.
00:08:57.000And three of these books are in the American Revolution.
00:09:00.000They're specifically on elite units in the American Revolution the Marylanders, the Marbleheaders, which were part of the original at Lexington and Concord, but formed the Navy and also Road Washington across the door, and Revolutionary Snipers.
00:09:17.000It's here in 1774 that's really kind of the precursor of the Declaration of Independence, is something called the Fort Gower Resolves, where these men had just fought.
00:09:30.000Against a massive Native American army and won.0.73
00:09:34.000And it's here that they declare their allegiance to the crown, but with a big butt.0.98
00:09:40.000It's about American liberty and freedom, and they're willing to fight for it.
00:09:45.000So, again, we're talking about 250 years back, is of course the year of the Declaration of Independence, but it's also, I think a lot of people are aware, the year of the great, kind of the greatest crisis of the American Revolution.
00:10:07.000What was the military situation like 250 years ago?
00:10:10.000I know this is a big part of Washington's Immortals, for example, that's the Maryland Line Regiment that basically saves America, the American cause, from being annihilated.
00:10:23.0001776 is a great turning point, but it was also the origins of one of the great crisis periods in American history where everything could have been lost.
00:10:36.000Key inflection points where this occurs.
00:10:40.000The three books that I've written are on elite units that touch upon these inflection points.
00:10:47.000And it's their individual agency that saves the war and Washington's army.
00:10:53.000But the first great inflection point is at the Battle of Brooklyn.
00:10:57.000And this begins on the night of August 26, 27, 1776, where the greatest land battle.
00:11:09.000Up until that point begins where the British land in Brooklyn, Long Island, and they outflank Washington's army.
00:11:20.000And it's here that, you know, everything could be lost.
00:11:24.000If 10,000 troops of the Continental Army are surrounded and annihilated and Washington is captured, the war is likely over.
00:11:32.000But it's the efforts of the men in the three books I've written, especially beginning with the Maryland line and Washington's immortals.
00:11:42.000Where there's an epic rear guard action near a stone house where they charge three times with fixed bayonets.
00:11:49.000They sacrifice themselves to open a hole in the British lines that allows the remainder of Washington's army to escape to the fortifications in Brooklyn Heights.
00:12:00.000And it's here that Washington has a great decision to make.
00:12:03.000Does he stay and fight or does he retreat?
00:12:06.000And a massive hailstorm comes in, a nor'easter, and it's in a mansion in Brooklyn Heights at the Three Chimneys.
00:12:14.000Where he decides, he has a council of war, and he decides to evacuate Brooklyn.
00:12:20.000And it's on the shoulders of the indispensable men from Marblehead that they escape.
00:12:49.000But oh, they got to do it in the middle of a giant 20,000 man Hessian and British army in their front and the Royal Navy in the East River behind them.
00:13:08.000And suddenly, the winds change, but it's on the backs of the greatest sailors in the Continental Army, the Marblehead men of the 14th Regiment and John Glover.
00:13:21.000That they are somehow able to get across.
00:13:23.000And it's this is a race against time, Blake and Andrew.
00:13:27.000They have to ferry the army across nearly a dozen times back and forth.
00:13:33.000And it's a race against time because dawn is coming and with it, you know, visibility and the entire small fleet of small boats conducting this American Dunkirk are about to be blown to smithereens by the Royal Navy.
00:13:48.000But it's here that God's hand, you know, shows itself in a fog.
00:13:54.000Miraculously, at the right time at around 5 30 a.m., comes in and screens the movement of the rest of John Glover's boats.
00:14:04.000General Washington and the riflemen from American snipers are in that rear guard.
00:14:10.000They're the last men on the boats, but they make it across in one of the greatest evacuations in military history.
00:14:17.000You think of everything that's ever happened in American history the Emancipation Proclamation, winning World War II, landing on the moon, everything we've invented, the right flyer.
00:14:28.000And it's all resting on these men who maybe, I don't even know if they've heard the text of the Declaration of Independence yet.
00:14:58.000I think that's like, for our modern context, that really brings it home.
00:15:01.000It's the American Thermopylae where the Marylanders make this epic stand.
00:15:06.000And I will add that the men of the Maryland 400, most of them have never, 256 men have vanished to history.
00:15:17.000It is very likely that there is a mass grave in Brooklyn of their bodies and their sacrifice to this day.
00:15:25.000Many of them were also captured, and they may have been on floating concentration camps in New York Harbor and just.
00:15:33.000Just tossed overboard like bags of trash, their bones.
00:15:37.000So, this is a story of epic sacrifice.
00:15:40.000It's a fitting story for Memorial Day because if it hadn't been their sacrifice, an hour, as one historian at the time said, an hour more precious in our history than any other, we would not be here today.
00:15:52.000But that, I will add, is only one disastrous defeat in 1776.
00:16:03.000How much are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness worth to you?
00:16:07.000This is the question America's founders had to answer.
00:16:10.000You see, for more than 150 years, America's 13 colonies governed themselves until Britain declared they had no right to self rule.
00:16:19.000So, ordinary people had to make extraordinary choices and risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to fight for independence.
00:16:28.000And in victory, they built one of the most stable and lasting republics in human history.
00:16:33.000Now, experience the American Revolution like never before, thanks to our friends at Hillsdale College.
00:16:38.000Revolutionary America, a new documentary from Hillsdale Studios and narrated by Tom Selleck, brings the founding of our nation to life through the voices of those who lived it, alongside insights from leading scholars and commentators.
00:16:52.000I'm telling you, Hillsdale has outdone themselves with this.
00:17:07.000I mean, listen, at a time when history is off.
00:17:09.000Often distorted in schools and classes and media, this is your chance to see the story as it really happened and ask yourself what would you risk for freedom?
00:17:18.000Face the decisions our founders grappled with in Revolutionary American, a Hillsdale Studios film, only in theaters May 31st through June 2nd.
00:17:25.000So get your tickets now by going to hillsdale.edu/slash revolution.
00:17:30.000You do not want to miss this opportunity to see this on the big screen: hillsdale.edu/slash revolution to locate a theater near you and buy tickets for Revolutionary American.
00:17:41.000One more time, that's hillsdale.edu/slash revolution.
00:17:48.000Well, we were discussing the great crisis period of the American Revolution, 1776.
00:17:55.000We just covered the Battle of Brooklyn Heights and the escape, the American Dunkirk.
00:18:16.000I mean, after the Battle of Brooklyn, the British land in Manhattan, and it's punctuated by a few victories.
00:18:25.000For instance, at Harlem Heights, there's a victory over British regular soldiers, some of the elite units.
00:18:32.000And it's the men of the riflemen that actually deal that defeat on the British, as well as they stop a landing where 25 riflemen armed with the Pennsylvania Long Rifle, which is the sniper rifle of its day, it was path breaking technology.
00:18:48.000They stop an entire British invasion at Throg's Neck.
00:18:51.000But really, after that, it's one disaster after another.
00:18:54.000And Washington's army of 20,000 is in full retreat across Manhattan, up through White Plains.
00:19:01.000They then cross the Hudson River and they're going into New Jersey and they're trying as quickly as they can to get to the Delaware River and across it to the friendly farms of Pennsylvania and hopefully safety.
00:19:15.000But it's at this time, there's massive hyperinflation.
00:19:18.000The army of 20,000 is crumbling because The enlistments are expiring at the end of the year.
00:19:26.000You know, Washington's army is reduced to, you know, 5,000 or so.
00:19:31.000And it's here that, you know, it's the great crisis point.
00:19:35.000Washington knows if he doesn't conduct a counteroffensive that changes the course of things, all will be lost.
00:19:43.000And it's at Trenton that he plans really one of the greatest counteroffensives, one of the great battles in American history that will change the tide of the Revolutionary War.
00:19:55.000And it's a dangerous and hazardous thing because the British and their allies, the Hessians, Are outposted across New Jersey.
00:20:05.000And he chooses Trenton, which is one of the more vulnerable outposts, but it's manned by the Hessian lion, Colonel Rawl, who's one of their best commanders.
00:20:19.000But like the Battle of Brooklyn, they have to cross a river.
00:20:22.000And, you know, they have to do it secretly because if the plan is known, the entire thing can be blown.
00:20:30.000When indeed the British intelligence did pick up that Washington was coming.
00:20:35.000But it's a nor'easter that once again comes into play.
00:20:39.000And it's once again that Washington asked John Glover if he can take the army across.
00:20:48.000There were three prongs of the attack on Trenton, two of them failed.
00:20:53.000It was only the men of the Marblehead Regiment that got the army across because the tides in the Delaware River were such that there were floating chunks of ice.
00:21:06.000There was a massive nor'easter, snow was coming down.
00:21:09.000It was impassable to anybody but the most experienced seafarers of the Marblehead Regiment.
00:21:16.000And they'd make it across and they attack Trenton at dawn.
00:21:21.000They're behind schedule, but they surprised the garrison.
00:21:26.000They were not, it's like in all the storybooks out there, these guys were not drunk and idle.
00:21:32.000They were actually sleeping in their uniforms with their muskets in hand and ready for the American attack.
00:21:38.000In fact, British intelligence actually tipped them off.
00:21:41.000And I get into the Indispensables as well as Revolutionary Snipers, which comes out in November, and Washington's Immortals, and how that intelligence was relayed.
00:21:52.000But an earlier raid, as well as the Nor'easter, sort of convinced Rawl that it probably already occurred.
00:21:59.000And he wasn't as alert as he should have been.
00:22:03.000And they attack, and it's a sniper's rifle that will take down and mortally wound Johann Rawl and will swing the course of the battle.
00:22:14.000But this is just 10 days in crucial American history and three battles, which will change the course of world history.
00:22:22.000And it's all part of Washington's counteroffensive at Trenton.
00:22:26.000And then there's the second Battle of Trenton, which hardly anybody's ever heard about, but it's a great inflection point as well.
00:22:32.000And a key bridge had to be held, and the Continentals were across something called Assam Peak Creek on the other side of Trenton.
00:22:39.000And had the bridge fallen, the army would have been ripped apart and destroyed, just like the Battle of Brooklyn.
00:22:48.000They hold the bridge against all odds.
00:22:51.000The riflemen literally delay them for about six or seven hours, chewing up precious daylight as they're on their way to the bridge, and then they hold the bridge against all odds.
00:23:03.000Washington himself is at the rail of the bridge, leading his men.
00:23:07.000I mean, that's how just the leadership is striking across the board from enlisted men to General Washington himself.
00:23:19.000And then they win the surprise battle at Princeton and change the course of history.
00:23:37.000This is what's interesting to me, Patrick, is that you've got 13 colonies, right?
00:23:43.000I understand a lot of this is happening in New Jersey and, you know, Massachusetts, New York.
00:23:48.000So it was up north mostly in this particular season.
00:23:52.000But you've got, because I don't think a lot of people realize nowadays how much.
00:23:58.000If you were a colonialist, you identified with your state versus Americans, being an American at this point, right?
00:24:07.000What was holding them together in these dark days?
00:24:09.000Like, how did they keep going after defeat, defeat, defeat?
00:24:15.000Especially understanding that the British force was so formidable and was, you know, the greatest force militarily in the world at that point.
00:24:25.000What's so remarkable is that it's small groups of individuals that will hold the army together.
00:24:35.000And the American Revolution was an insurgency.
00:24:38.000It was our first civil war because not everybody was on board at all with the Revolutionary War.
00:24:45.000And they would jump sides back and forth.
00:24:47.000And it was also a conventional war against the greatest power at the time.
00:24:51.000And, you know, I'll never forget, I asked a member of Darby's Rangers, I've interviewed 4,000 World War II veterans.
00:24:59.000And, you know, throughout the course of my I've been writing for 27 years full time and I've been interviewing people for the last 40 years or more.
00:25:08.000And I asked him, Are you the greatest generation?
00:25:11.000And he said to me straight up, He said, Patrick, what about the boys of 77 and 76?
00:25:17.000He said, The men of the cause, the men that believed in the Revolutionary War.0.93
00:26:05.000Obviously, there was the Stamp Acts and the Intolerables, and there was all these things that were circulating.
00:26:11.000But again, this sense of home and their identity.
00:26:16.000Like, when did Americans start thinking of themselves as Americans?
00:26:20.000It begins prior to the Revolutionary War.
00:26:22.000It begins in that period of over 150 years where they were self governing and they were determining their independence, and it forms over time.
00:26:34.000Of this identity of being an American.
00:26:37.000And what you have is at the very beginning of the American Revolution, there's a sense that perhaps the king, who many of them still pledge allegiance to, can somehow resolve their grievances.
00:26:52.000But they start to move away and closer and closer to full independence.
00:26:58.000And as you alluded to at the beginning, a series of atrocities, beginning with.
00:27:05.000You go back to the 1760s and beyond, where the Royal Navy is impressing, kidnapping Americans from places like Marblehead.
00:27:15.000And it's a lifetime of service in the Royal Navy.
00:27:17.000They never come home to their families, or they're killed on board ships, or the Boston Massacre.
00:27:26.000You know, these are things that will crystallize the American resolve of the American Revolution and the American identity.
00:27:39.000And this is where people will put their lives and their fortunes on the line for a country that had yet to be born, which is really remarkable.
00:27:50.000Yeah, I think that's one of the most interesting things.
00:27:53.000I mean, just to give you sort of a sense, let's just, you know, we look at modern combat where people are well paid and they're well equipped.
00:28:01.000These men of the pause in 76, many of them were shoeless, literally, their trails of blood.
00:28:09.000As they went to the boats at Trenton, they would mark the army's march to Trenton.
00:29:14.000How is he becoming the man who would become the father of this country?
00:29:17.000George Washington is the indispensable man of the Revolutionary War.
00:29:22.000It's his leadership that is priceless and indispensable in making things happen because he understands the concepts of liberty and freedom and how those need to translate not only in the halls of Congress, but also on the battlefield.
00:29:40.000And things like treating prisoners properly, these things transcend the halls of Congress and the battlefield, and they become part of the American way of war.
00:29:53.000He's able to enter, he's the first general since General Pershing, really, to have to interact with an ally.
00:30:01.000I mean, after the Battle of Saratoga, the French come into war as well as the Spanish later on.
00:30:07.000And it's this understanding of diplomacy and working with allies that he's able to coordinate that.
00:30:11.000But he's also dealing with the politics of the day.
00:30:16.000And it's as ruthless in many ways as it is today, where you have people that are.
00:30:22.000That are in the Civil War that are hardcore loyalists, but you also have people on the Patriot side that you've got a full spectrum.
00:30:30.000Everybody from a Benedict Arnold, who's a great general at the very beginning of the war, to a full blown traitor at the end of the war, to people that are just backbiting Washington, buying it for his position.
00:30:43.000You know, through all of that and through, you know, not having his men paid or poorly equipped and everything else, he holds the army together.
00:30:54.000The thing is, I would point out that the books that I've written, the three books, you know, Washington's The Indispensables, Washington's Immortals, and now Revolutionary Snipers, this is about the men of the line, the privates, the corporals, the sergeants that really hold the army together in their resilience.
00:31:13.000And to gain their stories, I tapped in the great.
00:31:18.000Oral history archive of the American Revolution that until Washington's immortals had ever hardly been touched.
00:31:26.000And that was the pension application files that, if you were a surviving member of the Revolutionary War, you could go down under oath and swear to a judge what you saw and did.
00:31:38.000And in some cases, these are the first person accounts and they can be very graphic of what these men saw and did.
00:31:45.000And those are the stories that are imbued in the nonfiction that I write that, in many That many people have said reads like fiction, but there's over a thousand endnotes of primary sources that buttress the stories that are a band of brothers.
00:32:01.000I wrote the first band of brothers, Washington's Immortals, on the American Revolution.
00:32:06.000It's a very cohesive story about this small group of men through their personal agency, really changed the course of the war.
00:32:15.000We talk about what was the greatest generation, and that World War II vet pointed back to the boys of 76 and 77.
00:33:04.000And they had to not only contend with hostile Native Americans, which were there to burn out their houses.0.65
00:33:11.000And many of these men, their families were executed by Native Americans.
00:33:16.000And in some cases, they were Native Americans that were allied to the crown.
00:33:20.000I mean, but the story has nuance where Native Americans also fought with us.
00:33:25.000But it's that rugged individual dealing with the elements, dealing with massive uncertainty in their lives, but somehow.
00:33:32.000They have to forge not only a life survival, but they forge a nation.
00:33:39.000And it's this collective effort, this rugged individualism, this resilience, this belief in freedom and liberty, which is a time of the great kings and empires where you were swearing allegiance to the crown.
00:33:58.000This is where subjects become citizens.
00:35:14.000Everybody's waiting, waiting to see if the ceasefire holds, waiting to see if the Strait of Hormuz reopens, waiting to see what happens next.
00:35:36.000Remember, the best time to put on a seatbelt is before the accident, not after.
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00:36:19.000We talked a lot about this, and I'm going to detail why.
00:36:26.000America is the greatest country in the history of the world.
00:36:28.000First and foremost, it was the first country ever to be founded on an idea, not on a racial background, not on ethnocentrism, not on any sort of lineage, but an idea, an idea very simple.
00:36:39.000An idea that we do not get our rights from government, but we get our rights naturally, whether it be from a creator or from God or from some supernatural being.
00:36:48.000So, America is the greatest country in the world for a couple of reasons.
00:37:02.000I hope you are spending this day in gratitude for the gifts of Providence that have been bestowed upon the American people and the American Republic.
00:37:09.000And in hour one, we spent a lot of time thinking about the revolution, the boys of 76 and 77.
00:38:05.000And there's been a lot of ink spilled, and it's a really fascinating history.
00:38:08.000But why don't we advance our attention up and fast forward to the 20th century and what brings us up to now?
00:38:16.000Because I know you've done a lot of work on the Vietnam War and the Korean War, but let's start this first segment on World War I and World War II, maybe some stories of sacrifice of the American story that are just unique to this country.
00:38:30.000Yeah, well, World War I is a fascinating case.
00:38:34.000It's something we don't tend to know as much about as Americans, although we should.
00:38:38.000But it was a war that was fraught with controversy, both as America gets in and afterwards, which is worth remembering because, in fact, most of our wars have controversy of this sort.
00:38:52.000But the American military really was not very well prepared.
00:38:58.000And this is really a turning point in our history that we had thought we could be citizen soldiers and that we didn't need to have a large standing army.
00:39:08.000That is really not well prepared for the war it's about to enter.
00:39:14.000And so you have a lot of Americans suffering.
00:39:19.000The initial plan for General Pershing was that we were going to break out of this trench warfare of which we're all too familiar, these horrific conditions, people spending years in these awful trenches.
00:39:33.000And the Americans hope to get out of it, but ultimately we end up having to fight that conflict.
00:40:24.000And how controversial was it to send us in the first place when I mentioned this isolationist streak?
00:40:30.000Yes, well, it's interesting because the country at the turn of the century has this resurgence of patriotism.
00:40:37.000When the Spanish American War comes, you have a massive amount of volunteering.
00:40:42.000And when World War I comes, you do still have.
00:40:45.000Lots of volunteers, but that war certainly had some controversy.
00:40:48.000You had Irish Americans, German Americans who weren't excited about fighting against their native countries, and a lot of people just asking, why does this fight concern us?
00:41:02.000And Britain was blockading Germany, and so some American questions whether that was fair.
00:41:11.000But there was certainly an enormous sense of patriotism.
00:41:15.000You had Great faith in the nation and its ideals.
00:41:20.000We didn't have any of the sort of questioning that we're going to see in about five decades or so within this country.
00:41:31.000I think people, average Americans, wouldn't even understand what the war was about.
00:41:36.000Historians argue about what the war was about.
00:41:39.000And they found themselves asking that question very shortly after.
00:41:42.000I think an interesting strain in American life is in the 1930s.
00:42:17.000A lot of people look back and say, Did we really fight this for the wrong reasons?
00:42:23.000And there was some truth to the fact that British propagandists were exaggerating what the Germans were saying.
00:42:30.000And there were other arguments that somehow the munitions industry pulled us in.
00:42:35.000But we have these series of neutrality acts passed in the 1930s because of this general unease and this idea that we got sucked into a war that we didn't necessarily need to.
00:42:46.000And 100,000 Americans is an enormous price to pay.
00:42:50.000And of course, there's no better time to remember that than on Memorial Day.
00:43:27.000The Europeans, of course, have been warring for centuries.0.57
00:43:31.000And Warren Harding promised to return.
00:43:35.000To normalcy, that we were going to get back to our domestic affairs and not go crusading around the world.
00:43:41.000And there was also a general sense that Woodrow Wilson had gone too far with his idealism and his talk about how we have to make the world safe for democracy and put other countries' interests on a par with ours.
00:43:56.000And you had people returning to the notion that, yeah, we like the rest of the world, but this is our country and its interests come first.
00:44:05.000Man, it's occurring to me now just how this would echo, as you said, five decades later, but even now, how much foreign affairs like this can really challenge a domestic population of like, when is it worth it?
00:44:22.000When is it worth putting American lives on the line, lives and treasure?
00:44:27.000I find it oddly comforting to know that other generations have wrestled so greatly with this question.
00:44:52.000And we talked before about some of the things people learned.
00:44:56.000One of the biggest problems we had after the war was there was this notion that we had fought the war to end all wars.
00:45:05.000Now we're going to disarm because weapons cause war.
00:45:08.000And so we have these disarmament efforts.
00:45:11.000But it turns out the bad guys don't always play by the rules.
00:45:15.000And so Germany and Japan start rearming, and the United States and other countries are late in coming to the game.
00:45:25.000And so just barely is Franklin Roosevelt able to start mobilizing.
00:45:31.000And that's not really until after the fall of France in May of 1940.
00:45:35.000And the economy really won't get on a war footing until after Pearl Harbor.
00:45:40.000But once it happens, of course, it will be the biggest military buildup.
00:45:46.000In world history, 12 million Americans going, a lot of them volunteered, a lot of them drafted as well.
00:45:55.000And that does have implications because when you have a smaller war, you can rely on a lot of volunteers.
00:46:00.000But now we are really digging into the population in a great way.
00:46:07.000And so that's partly why we think of this generation as the greatest generation because so many of them went on to serve in the war.
00:46:16.000One thing that this points to World War I, World War II, we went into both conflicts with a pretty small military that we massively expanded.
00:46:24.000Ever since World War II, we've never really had a small military ever since.
00:46:29.000We sort of permanently have a large one.
00:46:32.000We do draft a large army again for Korea, for Vietnam, but after that, we go to the all volunteer military.
00:46:39.000This is getting a little more philosophical and abstract.
00:46:42.000Did America's identity change at all from that shift towards having a significant standing army that is professional and all volunteer as opposed to a small army of Conventional, often drafted citizen soldiers?
00:47:00.000Yeah, that's an excellent question, too.
00:47:01.000And, you know, there is certainly with World War II, we're going to have a military on an unprecedented scale.
00:47:06.000But there is, after World War II, a huge demobilization effort.
00:47:11.000And you go from about 12 million to, I think, 600,000 very quickly.
00:47:16.000And so the country actually will be very unprepared for the Korean War.
00:47:21.000And you get to the Korean War, there's the case of Task Force Smith, which was sent to try to stop the North Koreans.0.83
00:47:30.000In the early stages, and they lack equipment and lack suitable leadership.0.96
00:47:34.000And so this becomes the rallying cry for those who think we need greater readiness, that we want no more task force smiths.0.70
00:47:43.000And so it's really from that point on, I think you've got this really greater conviction that we, given our new position in the world, simply cannot afford to wait until war comes to prepare for war.
00:47:57.000And the identity, though, to drill deeper in that, you know.
00:48:02.000This idea that we now inhabited this position in the world, that we had to sort of police it.
00:48:09.000You think back to Eisenhower, though, and he's warning about the military industrial complex.
00:48:15.000This idea of national identity, though, did it shift in World War II?
00:48:19.000Was it the after war propaganda, the films that glorified these brave men and women, the fights?
00:48:25.000Is that all that kind of contributed to it, or was it the war itself?
00:48:30.000The war, I think, certainly had a very strongly unifying effect, and you had a lot of recent.
00:48:36.000Immigrant groups into the country being pulled together, people from different parts of the country.
00:48:42.000So I think it had a unifying and generally positive effect on the country.
00:48:47.000Now, when you get to this question of the military industrial complex, that is a trickier one.0.53
00:48:55.000And as I said, I think Americans were hoping we were going to have this peace dividend after the war, and there were expectations the Soviets were going to play nice.0.69
00:50:55.000Would our current bureaucracy be able to manage it?
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00:52:09.000You know, our modern imaginations have seen all the videos and, you know, all the movies.
00:52:15.000But this was like a war unlike any other.
00:52:18.000Maybe you could say that about World War II, certainly World War I, but this changed America forever.
00:52:25.000Just set the backdrop of what made it extraordinary and why was it so controversial?
00:52:30.000Yes, it is, I think, our most misunderstood war, which is why I've spent so much time looking at it.
00:52:38.000But when it starts out in the 50s with an American commitment to South Vietnam, there is broad bipartisan support for helping South Vietnam as part of the containment policy.
00:52:51.000We have set up a series of anti communist allies in Asia, fought the Korean War to.
00:52:59.000Save South Korea, we're supporting Taiwan, Japan.
00:53:04.000And so there is general consensus that Asia is a critical part of the world and we need allies there.
00:53:12.000And so it doesn't really get controversial until 1964.
00:53:19.000And really, some of the controversy starts in 1963.
00:53:23.000There's this disastrous coup that we support, which is a huge mistake.
00:53:27.000But then President Kennedy himself is assassinated just after that.
00:53:31.000And so You have Lyndon Johnson coming in, and he is really focused on his reelection.
00:53:39.000And well, this will come back to haunt him because he talks about how he's not sending American boys to Vietnam.
00:53:45.000And then after he's elected, he will send American boys to Vietnam.
00:53:50.000But I think the rationale in terms of protecting the region from communist influence has stood the time very well.
00:54:00.000In the region we have today, anti communist allies, I think you can make the case that we actually saved many of those allies, but what we did in Vietnam, but the war itself was fought in an unfortunate way in many respects.0.64
00:54:17.000And so a lot of the disillusionment comes with the fact that the Johnson administration tried what was called gradual escalation, where we thought we would slowly increase the pressure on North Vietnam, but it ended up just playing into their hands.0.81
00:54:31.000But when Nixon comes in, You know, it's been a war for the Democrats, and Nixon could have thrown up his hands and walked away, but he said, No, this is still in our national interest, which I think he deserves a lot of credit for.0.71
00:54:43.000But a lot of the opposition that comes out too is connected to, I think, the baby boom.0.56
00:54:49.000And you have a lot of people who aren't really that focused on Vietnam, but they want to criticize their own country.0.71
00:54:56.000And so Vietnam becomes a convenient whipping boy.0.78
00:55:02.000There was a lot of social turmoil and change in America while this was unfolding.0.87
00:55:08.000But Do you think there's an unfortunate template that got set with Vietnam?0.92
00:55:13.000You mentioned they tried gradual escalation.
00:55:15.000And what stands out to me about that is, did America gradually escalate any other war we fought?
00:55:21.000I don't think Lincoln tried gradual escalation in the Civil War.
00:55:25.000I don't think FDR was doing anything like that with World War II.
00:55:28.000No, you just hyper mobilized to win the war.
00:55:32.000And once the war was done, you rapidly demobilized.
00:55:35.000And suddenly you have this almost, it's like war as a management consultant would come up with it, which.
00:55:41.000A lot of the guys who ran that war, Robert McNamara, I think he literally was a consultant beforehand or kind of that type of person he worked at, Ford Motors.
00:55:51.000Did we get sort of caught in the wrong loop where we started to treat conflicts as a thing to be managed that you could calibrate, you could half fight a war?
00:56:20.000And in 64 and 65, there are these sharp debates where you have the military, and these are generals who had fought in World War II in Korea, and they're saying, okay, if we're going to fight here, we're going to give them everything we've got and we're going to hit them hard right away.
00:56:35.000But you had McNamara pushing back on that.
00:56:39.000And one of the most sort of pathetic aspects of all this is that McNamara was very influenced by academic.
00:56:47.000Theorists who were using game theory and these other abstractions to try to come up with some new ways to manage conflict.0.57
00:56:56.000And it just turned out to be a complete disaster.
00:57:00.000But yeah, he came from the business world and he had a strong arrogance.
00:57:07.000He was also an intellectual who thought that these abstract theories had some place in the world.
00:57:13.000But it turned out human nature hasn't actually changed and the ways you fight wars really shouldn't change either.
00:57:23.000You know, and because again, I have in my childhood and growing up, I mean, from Forrest Gump onward, you know, you get so much Vietnam era content that's been created, and it feels all very depressing.0.65
00:57:38.000And you think about the backdrop of it, you had racial tension and the riots, Watts riots in the 60s, and then you had this basic malaise that started setting in in the 70s.
00:57:51.000How did it change the identity of America and the way we felt about ourselves?
00:57:58.000Yes, well, it was the first war where you had a significant part of the population actively disparaging military service.
00:58:06.000Now, in other wars, you'd had plenty of people dodging the draft, but this time you had the baby boomers claiming that, in fact, they were the real heroes because they didn't go to this war, which they thought was immoral.
00:58:21.000They didn't have a great case for that.
00:58:23.000And so this spills over into what follows in a lot of the media depictions.
00:58:28.000I think one of the worst things that happens in the Vietnam War is that.
00:58:32.000A lot of these people end up putting the blame on veterans, and veterans are treated horrifically after the war.
00:58:40.000Eventually, the left kind of figured this out.
00:58:42.000And so, in later conflicts, you don't have this same vilification.
00:58:49.000Everyone needs to know that it's the politicians who actually make these decisions about war and not the troops.
00:58:55.000But you've had this general, I think ever since that time, you've seen much of the left side of the political spectrum has been hostile to the military.
00:59:06.000You know, been a problem in terms of maintaining national unity when you have so many people who are disparaging this important institution.
00:59:15.000So, you mentioned the baby boomers were different in the sense that they were prepared to disparage the war effort.
00:59:22.000What made the baby boomers disparage it?0.55
00:59:24.000Was it the fact they were getting drafted?0.82
00:59:28.000Was it the idea that you're not killing other white Europeans, but these are Vietnamese in the jungles?
00:59:36.000Like, what was the central kernel that drove such controversy?
00:59:40.000Well, I think actually it was fundamentally about their own self preservation.
00:59:47.000Now, they tried to dress it up in more idealistic terms, but you've got to remember this was the most, the generation that had grown up in the greatest degree of affluence.
00:59:57.000And I think they were rightly characterized by some of their elders as saying this is a generation of spoiled brats.
01:00:16.000And you can see this too, because when the draft ends, most of the opposition to the war goes away.
01:00:23.000And so you had these young people who were self absorbed and they thought they were so important that they didn't want to risk their lives in some faraway conflict.
01:00:33.000So, Dr. Moyer, is your perspective that the aims and ambitions of the war effort were noble?
01:00:42.000Were they rightly placed or was it a miscalculation?
01:01:23.000But I think it was tremendously unfortunate, although we have benefited from the fact that we've got so many great Vietnamese who've come to this country.1.00
01:01:33.000Our current acting secretary of the Navy is actually a child of Vietnamese who came here.1.00
01:01:41.000But you've also got to remember we were fighting against an ideology that killed 100 million people worldwide.0.94
01:01:48.000And they killed more than fascism, but a lot of people don't.
01:01:52.000Talk about that, but that I think has to be at the center of the conversation.
01:01:56.000Yeah, I mean, gosh, that's it's you're saying these things, and I think that they are, uh, for example, Korea, South Korea is a thriving country now, unlike North Korea, because of the sacrifices of the Korean War.
01:02:13.000You know, uh, that was a bit of a stalemate.
01:02:16.000It's the in retrospect history has not judged it as a full win, right?
01:02:20.000You know, um, but I think it was a win.0.94
01:02:25.000It feels a little murkier to me, but you're giving me something to think about.1.00
01:02:29.000And yeah, I mean, listen, the baby boomers, they get mad at me on this show and they got mad at Charlie a lot, but I think there's some truth.0.98
01:02:36.000I mean, listen, if you grow up with the war dividend and this massive amount of wealth and this optimism, and then all of a sudden you get drawn down back into sort of a foreign conflict and a war overseas, yeah, I think they had a good point.0.84
01:02:50.000You know, you don't want to go have to fight a war in far flung places, but was the overall objective noble?
01:03:01.000Blake, we were having a conversation, and Dr. Moyer, I wonder if you would agree with it.
01:03:05.000But you were saying, as you wrestle through Vietnam.
01:03:09.000I just think about with Vietnam, what made me so sad about it is if you look at the people who signed up to go fight for that war, there were draftees, but there were many volunteers.
01:03:19.000And it was one of the actually a great generation of Americans who were incredibly patriotic, incredibly pro America, incredibly anti communist, wanted to serve their country, and they had.
01:03:31.000A leadership of this country that told them this is crucial for America's security.
01:03:35.000This is a war that is as important as anything we've ever fought, and we have a plan to win this.
01:03:42.000And it feels like a huge tragedy to me in that I feel that a lot of those men who went and many of them died were kind of lied to.
01:03:50.000They were lied to both about the nature of the war itself, but also, especially, having a plan that we had leaders.
01:03:58.000This is the first big case of us getting into a war where we didn't have a clear cut idea of how to win it.
01:04:05.000And even after it was clear they didn't have that idea, that the war was sort of perpetuated because it had inertia to it.
01:04:12.000Like it would be politically costly to back out.
01:04:17.000It's similar with like Afghanistan, for example, where you have U.S. troops continuing to die because Lindsey Graham has decided, I am a tough war on terror guy, and that means this war must continue.
01:04:32.000I'm curious about that, Dr. Moyer, because.
01:04:37.000Vietnam was the politicians leading it were World War II vets, right?
01:04:42.000They had fought in this triumphant war.
01:04:46.000Was the approach this like gradual escalation?
01:04:48.000Were they trying to adjust for the traumas of World War II?
01:04:52.000I mean, were they trying to avoid some of that?
01:04:55.000Where does that come from when you were so triumphant and so victorious that you would then go and lead men to battle in this kind of haphazard way?
01:05:07.000Limiting the war and gradual escalation comes mainly from McNamara, and he pushes it with Johnson, who was barely at all in World War II.
01:05:16.000I mean, he's in it for a brief moment, and he flies an airplane once and tries to make it into a big deal.
01:05:22.000But they are sort of petrified of nuclear war.
01:05:26.000Now, the Joint Chiefs of Staff are coming up with some alternative strategies, which actually I think would have won the war.
01:05:34.000One is to invade North Vietnam, one is to go into Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail.0.56
01:05:40.000Want us to step up the bombing of North Vietnam.
01:05:42.000And they kept recommending these things.0.99
01:05:44.000And Johnson and McNamara kept saying, oh, no, we can't do that because we're going to bring the Chinese and the Soviets in.0.77
01:05:51.000Now, Richard Nixon will end up doing some of those things, and it turns out the Chinese and the Soviets sat on their hands.0.88
01:05:58.000So there's this terrible miscalculation, and things are going better in the end.0.83
01:06:03.000And had it not been for Watergate, I think the South would have held on.
01:06:07.000But one of the most important things to know about Vietnam veterans is that by large majorities, they believe that the main problem in Vietnam was that the politicians would not let the military.
01:06:22.000Win the war, which is something you don't hear the mainstream media and movie and so forth.
01:06:28.000They don't want you to get that message.
01:06:30.000They want to say that this was some unwinnable conflict.
01:06:35.000But as someone who spent decades looking at this, I can say that that's definitely not the case.
01:06:41.000There were strategies that would have succeeded had we not been so petrified of what the Chinese or the Soviets might think.
01:06:50.000You know, that's a great place to end it because it takes us kind of up into our present moment where President Trump has said.
01:06:57.000Hey, the war on terror, you saw this in Trump 1.0, where he unshackled the US military to really achieve objectives, to use the full force and might of the US military.
01:07:08.000It seems like, you know, we've almost come out of this really bad, you know, I would say it's like 50 years of kind of really tough lessons.
01:07:19.000Do you predict that we've learned our lessons from this era?
01:07:22.000I mean, because we have the bravest men and women, the most awesome military on the planet.
01:07:28.000But we also don't want to fight dumb wars, right?1.00
01:07:30.000We don't want to keep this foreign adventurism.1.00
01:07:33.000I guess in the final minute and a half, two minutes we have here, have we learned our lessons?1.00
01:07:39.000Well, I think this country is not always one of our fortes of learning the right lessons.
01:07:46.000Of course, there's a lot of lessons you can learn from history.
01:07:48.000And one of the big problems you have is that sometimes we try to apply the lesson of one place in another.
01:07:55.000And so when we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, a lot of people who supported those were saying, well, we can.
01:08:01.000We can democratize these places because it worked in other countries.
01:08:04.000Well, it turns out Iraq and Afghanistan are Islamic states with different cultures.1.00
01:08:09.000I think that is the biggest reason why we failed in those places.1.00
01:08:14.000Now, I do think we've learned, if you look at what people say about Iran now, I think we recognize, well, we've now tried in Iraq and Afghanistan to turn them into democracies.0.99
01:08:34.000I mean, we could disagree till we're blue in the face about Iran, or you could agree with it, but boots on the ground in a nation of 90 million with sectarian splits and a deeply ingrained regime.0.51
01:08:49.000You know, thankfully we're not doing that.0.71
01:08:51.000And hopefully we won't ever have to do that.