>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
[ Silence ]   >> John Cole: Well good afternoon.

Welcome to the Library of Congress.   I'm John Cole.

I'm the director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress,
which is the library's book reading and literacy promotion arm.
We were created by Daniel Boorstin back in 1977 when he was Librarian
of Congress and he wanted the Library of Congress to find a way
to reach out to the general public to promote books and reading.
In those days literacy was not a huge topic in 1977.
The bigger topic, when you were talking about reading,
was the threat of television.
And so one of the things that Dr. Boorstin wanted us to do was
to use the new technologies to promote books and reading and one
of our major projects was the Read More About It messages that some
of you may have seen on CBS television for almost 15 years
when the star of the program came out after and said
if you enjoyed the program the Library
of Congress suggests these books.
That was the program that probably had the widest outreach for us.
We also now have stimulated state Centers for the Book
to promote writing, writers in every state
and we have reading promotion partners and here at the Library
of Congress we not only have Books and Beyond talks,
but we are closely involved with the National Book Festival.
We work on the author program
and the National Book Festival this year is September 21st and 22nd
and we hope you will all enjoy it once again.
We've expanded to two days and once again we will have more
than 100 speakers.
All of our Center for the Book talks are actually filmed
for later broadcast on the Library's website so I ask you
to please turn off all things electronic.
The format will be first of all learning
about a wonderful book based in part on the collections of the Library
of Congress but other libraries from our speaker.
Then there'll be a question and answer period and a book signing
at roughly about one o'clock.
You're invited to ask questions but by doing
so you're giving us permission to perhaps use you, your questions
and your face on our webcast.
I'm very pleased that we are able to have someone from the Humanities
and Social Sciences division from the Library
of Congress as a co-sponsor.
One of the joys of doing Books and Beyond lectures and talks
with co-sponsors and also with other kinds
of co-sponsoring programs is it lets us learn about what's going
on at the Library of Congress and keeps us in close touch
with the books that are being produced all
over from every part of the Library.
Our introducer today is the reference librarian representing the
Humanities and Social Sciences division.
It's Tom Mann who will introduce our speaker.
Tom is also the author of the "Oxford Guide to Research",
I think it's called Tom, I'll look again.
>> Library research.   >> John Cole: Library research.

But he's best known, I think, as LC's philosopher king on cataloging,
reference work, subject cataloging
and any other bibliographic subject you'd like to discuss.
May I present to introduce our speaker Thomas J. Mann.


>> Tom Mann: Well again on behalf both the Center for the Book
and the Humanities and Social Sciences division I'd
like to welcome you to the Mumford room here
for a very interesting talk, I'm sure, by James Srodes
on his new book "Dupont Circle".
Mr. Srodes has long had a career as a financial journalist working
for United Press International, Business Week, Forbes,
Financial World and the Sunday Telegraph,
and as a broadcaster he has a weekly commentary program
on the BBC World Service.
We know him in the Library's reading rooms are primarily
as a biographer and historian.
He is no stranger to the ins and outs
of doing research at this institution.
His list of publications is way too lengthy for me to go into
but I do want to mention that his biography, "Allen Dulles-Master
of Spies", was given the award for Best Intelligence Book of the Year
from the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.
Mr. Dulles appears again as part of a much larger cast of characters
in the current book "On Dupont Circle",
and I think there may be another reappearance of a theme rather
than a character for Mr. Srodes, Mr. Srodes excellent biography
of Benjamin Franklin, "Franklin The Essential Founding Father".
A book, by the way, that was promoted
by Philadelphia's own free library system
as a citywide group read during the celebration
of Franklin's 300th birthday.
In that book we read that Franklin was the ingredient
that made change happen and that "His best skills were
to plot strategies in private
and to write documents for public purposes."
Making change happen, plotting strategy in private
and writing documents for public purposes is a good shorthand
description of the much of the activity of an important
and colorful group of people who lived near Dupont Circle
from the nineteen teens and into the period between the wars.
This group includes Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt,
who lived at 2131 R Street.
Future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter
and columnist Walter Lippmann, who lived at 1727 19th,
and the Dulles boys, John and Foster and their sister Eleanor,
who lived at 1328 18th Street,
all within walking distance of each other.
Add to this mix a few more soon to be prominent British
and American diplomats and writers and you have a fascinating cast
of characters who all knew each other and who went
on to have a profound influence on American and world history.
"On Dupont Circle" is their collective biography and the story
of the whole inner war period told
through a fascinating perspective grounded in one
of our own D.C. neighborhoods.
Of course no Washington story of doings
of colorful characters would be complete without major sex scandals
and you'll read about those as well
in a book that's very hard to put down.
So please join me in welcoming James Srodes.
[ Applause ]   >> James Srodes: Thank you Tom.

Thank you so much.
As you have been forewarned I am here to talk about writing,
the Library of Congress,
and how those two themes helped shaped the book that I ended
up writing, and because you're here I presume that you have an interest
in writing in general and in language and that you are also fans
of the Library of Congress, which will lead me to interrupt my talk
for just a minute for a brief commercial message
on behalf of another book.
That is a book called "Shakespeare in Fact".
It is really three books in one.   It is an authoritative, final answer

to the current fashion among four intellectuals who maintain
that somebody named Will Shakespeare could not possibly have written all
of those comedies, tragedies and wonderful poems,
that indeed someone more suitable had to be the true author.
This book humiliates people like that and with a wicked wit
and some undeniable research.
It is also a very interesting explanation of the role,
the early role of the English theatre
in fostering the English language that is our treasure today.
And perhaps one of the most enjoyable parts of it, this book,
is the forward which is an elegant and evocative story
of the author himself, Irvin Leigh Matus,
who personally pushed the bounds
of personal eccentricity beyond the edges of the envelope.
This is a man who was, lived most of his life on very,
very few financial supports.
At one point was actually living, sleeping on the steam grates
across the street here, outside the library,
yet he was such a meticulous and authoritative independent scholar
that the research staff of the Library and Tom in particular,
took him to their hearts and helped foster him
and have been really [inaudible] aid in his production of this book,
which I am happy to say my friend Paul Dickson, who is here,
and Tom were instrumental in getting this book reissued
by Dover Publications.
So if you want to read three stories in one,
"Shakespeare in Fact" is something you could get very quickly
and should be part of your library.
And that ends the commercial portion of my message.
I write biography, which is a subset of history,
and over the last 30 years of doing
that I've formed some opinions I'd like to share with you.
One is that I believe
that biographies should serve two purposes.
First and foremost of course should be a faithful account
of the character's life.
Let's call this character A, this woman, this man.
And what makes A so compelling of interest to us?
But second and inextricably linked, I believe,
A's story should offer something that resonates with the reader,
that he can take with him in judging his own problems
and the current crisis and the current conditions.
There is no such thing as an authoritative history.
History is plastic and it depends on the time
that the author is putting his perspective to a story.
One of my favorite factoids involves a man known as George IV of England,
the Prince Region, who was canoodling with some girlfriends
in a, well the equivalent of a house of ill fame, when a courier arrived
to tell him about the Battle of Waterloo.
The Prince Region had two questions that night.
Did we win?   And who that I know got killed?

Now a year later the Prince Region was probably occupied by another set
of questions altogether,
not the least being what do we do about Napoleon?
A hundred years later, in 1914, 1915, Generals on both sides
of World War 1 were referring to Napoleon and Waterloo
for strategic insights because they were fighting
over much of the same ground.
And I would suggest that today a writer writing about oh,
topics from the organization of NATO to the founding
of the European Union, would begin their search back
at Waterloo and the Napoleonic era.
What that means is more than ever for biography and history
in general is that it is much more research driven
than it has ever been at any other time.
It's just not enough to go read the previous books on the topic.
You have to engage in really back to the original, thorough research
into time, consequence and individuals.
This of course is where the Library of Congress, I would argue to you,
occupies a unique situation.
I've done research in archives all over the place,
from Berlin to Paris, all of the archives in London and Edinburgh,
for Presidential libraries, more University libraries
than I can mention, our own National Archives, which is known
in our craft as Steny Hoyer's Folly, and the Library of Congress.
And the Library of Congress is something special,
not just because of it's all encompassing store house role
of American knowledge, but because of the energetic,
enthusiastic efforts by the staff in support of people like Paul
and myself, who come to them with very vague ideas
of what it is we want and because of their own encyclopedic knowledge
and because of their only the vast collection of traditional,
archival material, but their own sophisticated
and early warning grasp of the new internet facilities
and the new website archives
that are available, really make it possible.
For the library, my point is
to become a true active partner of the writer.
I've come to them with the most astonishingly weird questions.
I remember one time asking one of the reference librarians
if you could guide me into this question, what role did the Council
on Foreign Relations, when it was formed in 1920,
play in developing the foreign policy thinking
of Franklin Roosevelt?
Well was I not only guided to a website but I was tipped
to the private papers of two remote figures who just happened
to keep diaries during that period.
These were men who were friends of Roosevelt's' and the founders
of the CFR, and who from the early days remained part of this sort
of subculture of would become part of the New Deal 20 years later.
So suddenly, you know, whole new vistas opened up.
That, for what I do, is incredibly important
because I don't just write biographies,
I write something called narrative non-fiction
which is a pompously complicated phrase, the antithesis
of which is fiction, but a difference from traditional history
and biography in two important points.
Traditional history, traditional biography,
starts with the assumption that the reader needs to know a lot
about A, the subject at hand.
We who do narrative non-fiction start from the premise
that the reader may already know quite a bit about A,
and what we're looking for is not the chronological story
but that extra slice, that fresh look,
that question that traditional history doesn't get around to answer
and sometimes doesn't even ask.
And the second difference is narrative non-fiction requires me
to tell my story in the format reserved for fiction for novels.
So I like to have my character face a challenge.
It helps if the challenge turns into a crisis, but I also look
for some resolution of that crisis
that then resonates for the reader's use.
So I start with a list of questions when a subject comes to mind.
Not just what did A do that made them famous
but what did A think A was doing,
which are often two different things.
And then I ask a third question.   What was A thinking he was thinking?

How was A born?   How was A educated?

What did A read?
Who are the other people who influenced A?
And again this is where the Library of Congress
and its proactive staff are so critical because they introduce you
to people and facilities that the old way, 30 years ago,
just did not exist for writers like myself.
But before I can come to these questions I have to find a character
that engrosses me, that engages me, that sparks me
to ask more questions about it.
I find myself always, almost always, and I think Paul would agree
with me, if you come to a story that you think you want
to be interested in, you find yourself going
in through a back door that leads you somewhere completely different.
And that's fine, that's wonderful,
that's one of the exciting parts of what we do.
So it was with this book "On Dupont Circle".
The big question I try to ask about A is first of all how did A get
to do what made A famous?
And the thing that often triggers it is a little fact unknown
to most readers, that the standard publishing contract requires authors
to find, pay for and get permission to reproduce all photographs,
illustrations, maps and so on, that are to be used in the book.
So while you're doing the factual research you're always
on a photo hunt.   And so it was.

I was doing, as Tom mentioned, a biography of Allen Dulles,
and I was asking why did Allen Dulles get
to be not only the longest serving Central Intelligence Agency
Director, but the principal architect
of the intelligence community that we have existing even today?
One that is unique among the intelligent services of the world.
So as I began to scroll back through Dulles's life I came to really sort
of his early days when he was just out of Princeton and was recruited
as an intelligence gatherer for this uncle,
the Secretary of State Robert Lansing,
to go to Europe while America was still a non-combatant,
and he not only served there but during the war in Bern Switzerland
and was ultimately brought to Paris in 1919 to be
on the staff of Woodrow Wilson.
So the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was probably,
was the most photographed international conference in history.
It was just swamped with photographs so everywhere I went I was asking
for the photo boxes and I was out at the archives and I was here
at the Library and I began to get fresh questions.
I often compare myself to someone who's walking down the street
in a strange city and you think you know where you want to go
but you're not sure how to get there so you ask strangers on the street
who do I get to such and such?
And sometimes they give you completely bogus information,
you find yourself going up a dead end alley,
but sometimes you get routed around to neighborhoods
that you didn't know existed, and that's when you come
to what I call the ah ha moments where you say oh,
yes, now that makes sense.   The tumblers click, the door opens

and you've got a whole new vista in front of you.
Believe me folks you live for moments like the ah ha moment.
So I began to have little mini ah ha moments
as I was turning these photographs over and over and over
and there were thousands of photographs, all mostly posed,
and part of the dynamic was that the Paris Peace Conference was an
enormous undertaking.
Our traditional history kind of brushes over this period,
but it produced an enormous document in the Treaty of Versailles.
85,000 words, 440 clauses, every one of which created a new nation
or moved millions of people from one nationality to another,
they shifted boarders from Palestine all the way to Poland,
there were vast economic questions settled
and I was helped along this way by a wonderful book
by Margaret MacMillan, the Canadian historian,
and I believe great granddaughter of David Lloyd George,
the British Prime Minister, who concentrated
on the big four negotiators, Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau of France
and Orlando of Italy, who had to make these final decisions.
But it suddenly occurred to me that with all this heavy lifting,
all of it was done before the big four got to it by these staffs,
these young men and women who were photographed
and one ah ha moment was I said I was struck by how young they were.
And the more I looked I realized that many were in their 20s,
many more were in their early 30s.
The oldest prominent person in these staffs was Herbert Hoover
who was in his early 40s.
The other thing that struck me was that how many,
as you went from committee to committee
because every committee got its picture taken,
you began to see the same faces and that so many of them were people
who later when on to have enormously important world careers.
Major George C. Marshall, a youngish,
British Naval Lord named Winston Churchill,
a young Assistant Secretary of the Navy Frank Roosevelt,
as he was known in those days,
Walter Lippmann then already a probably the best known political
science author and thinking and newspaper columnist,
who was there on the staff of Woodrow Wilson
and was helping him ghost write the "Fourteen Points".

Felix Frankfurter was there with Chaim Weizmann, one of the founders
of Israel, lobbying for a Zionist state.
Allen Dulles was certainly there rising in the ranks of the staffs
to the point where he was Chairman of the Steering Committee
that brought these 440 clauses up for final settlement and then
on up the street to the big four.
But so was his brother, John Foster Dulles,
who was negotiating German war reparations with the wiz kid
of the British Treasury John Maynard Keynes, who later went
on to found Modern Economic Theory.
Eleanor Dulles was there working on aid and relief to the French.
Christian Herder, a future Secretary of State, was there.
It just went on and on.   William Bullet, a famous journalist.

So I suddenly was struck by the idea this is the book I'll write.
I'll write a book about the staffs as a compliment
to Margaret MacMillan but then I ran into the obvious problem.
How do you write a book about so many people?
Wilson had brought 500 staff people to Paris.
Geographers, demographers, economists,
map makers, aviation experts.
David Lloyd George brought 400 from London, although he had access
to many more just to channel trip away.
Clemenceau had the entire French government.
Men like Andre Tardieu, a future Prime Minister, Robert Shuman
and one of the founders of the European community.

So I said well, I keep seeing the same faces
and particularly two British noblemen.
One that's preposterously named Lord Eustis Percy
who was the Foreign Policy Advisor to the Foreign Minister
and the other name Phillip Carr who was a Scottish Lord,
who was the Principal Advisor on Foreign Affairs to Lloyd George.
They were everywhere.
They were in almost every photograph with the rest of my Americans.
So I thought well, I'll concentrate on the friendships.
After all these people worked 18 hour days for 6 months
on this treaty and then they drank the remaindered night away.
Ten thousand tourists had flooded into Paris,
which had been bombed, mind you, shelled.
Tourists, lobbyists, debutants looking for husbands
or just a good time, married women looking for the same.
Lobbyists, conmen, promoters, peasant delegations who arrived
in Paris on foot pleading for nationhood.
The place was a jam and everybody had a wonderful time
because Paris turned its lights on and dug up its champagne
that it had hidden from the Germans and everyone was having a ball.
So they must have had close friendships, the kind of bonding
that occurs when people work hard and then play hard.
And as I say women were there in enormous profusion.
Gertrude Bell, the British archeologist was there lobbying
for nationhood for her Iraqis.
Lawrence of Arabia was there in his robes lobbying
for the same status for his Saudis.   Everybody was there.

Ho Chi Min was there.
He wasn't partying, he was washing dishes.
So everybody had a chance to know everybody and that began to nag me.
So I finished the Dulles biography and I went on
and I wrote the Franklin biography
but I kept coming back to these questions.

It [silence] it annoyed me.
I realized that I couldn't do a biography of 1000 people
and moreover if you apply the stand of the rigors
of narrative non-fiction, what was the challenge, let alone the crisis?
Because everybody came away from Paris very disappointed.
Wilson had promised them to make the world safe for democracy
and the whole idea of the treaty and the League of Nations was
to create some sort of mechanical device
that would make war impossible.
And you'd kind of wind this up and every problem,
every political problem, every legal problem, every economic problem,
could be settled at the League.   So there was no need to go to war.

So you just set this clockwork mechanism going
and you could leave it alone.
And by June 1919 there was a realization among the people
who had worked hardest on it, that that wasn't going to happen.
Harold Nicolson, one of the later most talented British diplomats,
wrote from Paris "We came to build a new world and all we succeeded
in doing was destroying the old one."


And why, particularly, and whether, particularly,
what happened afterwards?
How did these people, these friends, what did they decide
to do faced with this failure.
Now the traditional history is that the world then slid automatically
into a period of intense isolation, as in personal hedonism
and stock market gambling and bootlegging and so on and so forth.
But I began to get a little hints and niggles
that this was not necessarily so,
but first I had to find my characters.
And so I began to read the books about, the memoirs of and studies
of people like Felix Frankfurter and FDR and Walter Lippmann
and Eustis Percy and Phillip Carr,
and that's when I got my big ah ha moment.
They did know each other but they didn't just meet in Paris,
they'd met here in Washington three years earlier.
In 1916 I suddenly had a cast of characters that had been here,
as Tom says, living around Dupont Circle.
They were close, intimate friends
and they all concentrated in three houses.
They were kind of the epicenters of their friendship
and where they all came and went into each on a regular basis.
Now you need to know at the time Dupont Circle occupied,
in those days, what Lafayette Square had been during the Civil War
and shortly afterwards, and what Georgetown would become
under the Kennedy Johnson era.
A place where you had to be if you wanted to be anybody
of importance in Washington.
And it was particularly attractive to young people
because while there were enormous mansions around the circle,
there were also fairly affordable townhouses and boarding houses,
which were a unique social institution to the time
where a young person could live and eat
and entertain friends in some propriety.
The three houses, as Tom said, varied in size and purpose.
One was a huge mansion, a joint family house for an old Secretary
of State named John Watson Foster, who later became sort
of the leading authority on international disputes
and arbitration, which was an early solution tried to prevent war.
And one of his sons in law, Robert Lansing, who was the Secretary
of State, but also in residence were John Foster Dulles,
who was just finishing getting his law degree
from George Washington University.
And Allen Dulles who was fresh out of Princeton and Eleanor Dulles
who had grown up in the house because she had gone
to a special school here in Washington for children
who had eyesight difficulties.
If you wanted a career in the State Department you'd better be able
to be received at the Foster Lansing mansion.
Right around the corner, it doesn't, neither of these houses exists,
but right around the corner on N Street, near where the Taber Inn is,
was a house given, lent to, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt,
and their huge population of Louis Howe, his political mentor,
their rapidly expanding family of children,
and of course Eleanor's social secretary
and Franklin's later mistress, Lucy Rutherford.
[Silence] If you wanted a career in the Navy Department you had
to call on Frank Roosevelt.
And of course one of the things to remember is
that in those days the State Department, the War Department
and the Navy Department, each occupied a whole floor
of that French Empire monstrosity that still exists
on Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street,
known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
So the whole government was concentrated, of that type,
was concentrated right there in that building and then across,
next to the White House on the other side, was the Treasury,
and all around Lafayette Square were a growing number
of bureaucracies and so on.
So, this is the neighborhood where strivers had to come,
but then I found the house of truth.
This is a house that still exists on 19th Street.
It's a modest little house
which happily now has owners who are restoring it.
It was a boarding house for gentlemen,
for progressive gentlemen, and this is a place where in addition
to Walter Lippmann and Felix Frankfurter,
who were already well known but had come to Washington
to work in the War Department.
So also in residence was Eustis Percy who was
at the British Embassy, which was in those days at Connecticut and R.
And also an occasional but regular resident was Phillip Carr,
who after 1916 was in town trying to lobby the American government
into increasing its shipments of arms and supplies
to an increasingly beleaguered Britain.
This was the fun place of the three houses.
These were young men, they were, they were as I say drinkers
of the new cocktail, daiquiris, they played this hot new music, jazz,
they welcomed young ladies of self-reject proclivities,
they smoked cigarettes, they danced, but mostly they sat
around a large table in the dining room
and they argued politics all night.
And the [inaudible] of the house was Oliver Wendell Holmes,
the Supreme Court Justice, who would bring other justices and people
from the Senate and the House to kind of goad these young people
and Holmes later wrote "They were the fastest talkers
and the quickest minds in Washington".
And Frankfurter said, "Yes he said that."
And he was right.
But Holmes would goad them and test them
and of course the British had their agenda, which was to draw America
into the war into at least an imaginative confederation
of English speaking progressive people like themselves.
The Americans were a little reluctant to that,
but one of the things that did unite them was that they were all
in that [inaudible] movement known as Progressivism.
Now Progressivism today means something totally different.
In those days to be a progressive, you could be a progressive
with almost as many different causes as you could imagine.
Of course suffragette progressives,
there were also birth control progressives, advocates,
were also advocates of eugenics
and forced sterilization and miscegenation laws.
There were economic progressives and the socialist progressives
and anti-socialist progressives and [inaudible] progressives
and prohibition progressives and free booze progressives.
It was just bewildering and fractious movement.
But it had originally founded and certainly Lippmann and Frankfurter
and others were adherence to the early movement,
which was Theodore Roosevelt progressivism,
which saw government's role as an umpire between labor and capital.
But as Roosevelt fell into decline
after his presidency these progressives began a rather grudging
and suspicious movement over to the core cause of Woodrow Wilson.

What united them all, British and Americans,
was a commitment to peace.   Again for a very selfish reason,

not an airy fairy idealistic notion, it was very pragmatic.
War interrupted social change.
It took resources away and wasted them.
Resources that were far better to be put to use in improving the life
of people, of clean air, clean water, adequate food,
public education, infrastructure, all the things that we now take
for example, for granted.
And so there remained the center core of peace advocacy.
They really welded them to Wilson, and interestingly
when Wilson finally reached the decision that we had to intervene
in World War 1, they made a dramatic change.
They all, by and large, rallied to the war cause
because they saw America had a sudden gift, an opportunity,
to dominate the peace process that would follow.
It didn't quite turn out that way, but it led me to the big question
that I suddenly realized I had to ask and then answer.
Why after 1919, with so many of them agreeing that the League
of Nations was not up to the job of preserving a world peace,
did many of these same people become so important 20 years later
in the founding of the United Nations,
which was an even more ambitious
and more all-encompassing League of Nations?
Remembering that the League of Nations stayed in business,
if in isolation, in Geneva until 1944.
How did we get a United Nations?   Was it inevitable?

History, after all, is about choices.
I reject the notion that some people are born to destiny.
History is made by people making choices
and often the people are very ordinary people, like ourselves,
who are confronted by extraordinary circumstances


Sometimes these are people who are not very much like us.
They have a single minded facet to their personality
that makes them uniquely positioned and often that comes,
as I also report in this book, with substantial human failings
in other areas of their lives.
Many of these people do not make good parents for example,
but nonetheless my cast of characters all ended
up answering the question by their personal choices which led
to the immediate crisis and the resolution that ties this book up.
Over the next 20 years I chronicle how their minds change,
their attitudes change, as they go
from one solution for peace to another.
It all starts, unlike the traditional version of history not
with isolation, but with almost non-stop peace conferences.
There were disarmament conferences called by Warren Harding.
They reduced the number of battleships
which were the atomic weapons of the day.
There were almost annual conferences in Geneva or London on peace,
on disarmament and then they kind of morphed into economic conferences
to adjust what was clearly a world economy
that was tilting ever steadily off balance.
And after disarmament and economic efforts there was the general
pledges against war in particular, which everybody signed,
and that then led in the 30s to a preparedness movement for Americans
because it began to occur to some people that we weren't going
to be able to stand aloof from a world
that seemed determined to go to war.
This led to Franklin Roosevelt making a remarkable move in 1939
at a time when the war had not even started
and when isolation is sentiment
in the American public was overwhelmingly dominate.
Roosevelt did something uncharacteristic.


Roosevelt's, one of his great characteristics is
that he had an uncanny sense
of just how far he could lead the American public and he never tried
to get too far out in front of the parade, less he turned around
and found out the parade has gone somewhere else.
This shaped his relationship with his partner Eleanor Roosevelt
and in ways that I hope I made clear, it created what I believe
as a unique, the only time when we had a true joint presidency.
Not a First Lady and President but a true inextricable partner.
And Franklin used her shamelessly and she took the burden
on with enthusiasm of putting forward social issues
that were highly risky and when they ran into back life
of course he could deny her,
but when of course she succeeded, he could take credit.
In 1939 he commissioned a secret study on America's post war role,
a war that hadn't started.   It was so secret that the Secretary

of State was not allowed to know about it.
Congress was not allowed to know about it.
It was funneled through the Council of Foreign Relations.
It was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and it was to deal
with five topics that America would have to address
after any war that might start.
And they were obviously freedom of the seas, freedom of trade,
colonial status, but the fifth item for study was vaguely worded.
It was how America could foster an international organization
that would promote and indeed enforce peace.
This is 1939.
By the time the Germans invaded Poland the study was up and running
and it brought together people like Lippmann, Frankfurter,
the entire CFR staff, the entire staff of the British alternative
which was the Royal Institute of International Affairs,
known as Chatham House, which Percy and Carr had helped to found.
Carr, by the way, was in Washington as the British Ambassador.
All these people were brought together
under enormously clandestine circumstances to begin planning
and plotting and they got the architecture
of what would be called the United Nations in place and agreed
to by the British in what became known
as the Atlantic Charter Conference where Churchill and Roosevelt met
on battleships up in the Nova Scotia bay.
The story I tell has, it kind of ends in kind of a car chase
where much is at risk and nothing is certain and it kind of ends in kind
of a near catastrophe, which could have deprived Roosevelt
of his third term in office and which could of, of course,
shaped America's response in World War II and certainly in the creation
of the United Nations, which never would have occurred.
This is the story and this is something
that I think you all will find it both enjoyable
and I hope instructive and I thank you all for coming
and paying attention, and I hope I've wetted enough appetites
that I can get some questions from you,
but most of all thank you all very much.
[ Applause ]   So please stick a hand up, somebody.


Are you all thoroughly educated?   Yes sir?

>> [Inaudible]   >> James Srodes: Allen Dulles.

>> Uh huh.
>> James Srodes: Yes, what about him?
>> [Low audio]
>> James Srodes: How did he get to do what he did?
Well, how did Allen Dulles get to do what he did
and what was his role in this group?
Allen Dulles is kind of a sleeper character.
He became CIA Director because President Truman had asked him
and a couple other men to draw up an architecture
for a Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, and he got to do
that because he had, after the war, been president of the Council
on Foreign Relations and he got to do
that because he had been the preeminent spy for the OSS
in Switzerland and he got to do that because all during this period
of the 20s and the 30s, while America was not a member
of the League and did not have official status at many
of these conferences, America did send delegations.
Harding sent them, Coolidge sent them, Hoover sent them,
Roosevelt sent them and primarily there were two men,
a man named Norman Davis who was a diplomat and lawyer and Allen Dulles
who became the leading arms negotiator in all of these treaties.
And he got to do that because he'd been a highly successful member
of the staff at Paris, he'd been a successful spy and then later,
after the war, he'd gone to Turkey and then came to be head
of the Middle Eastern division
at the State Department before he joined Foster
and Sullivan and Cromwell.
So even though most people didn't know who he was he was the go to guy
for successive Presidents, literally from Woodrow Wilson
on through to Linden Johnson.   He knew everybody.

James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, began his career
as a young Army sergeant attached to the intelligence service who served
as the bag carrier for Allen Dulles during the 50s when Dulles would go
on these world-wide tours to inspect CIA facilities and Billington likes
to tell about setting down in some remote desert airport
and being greeted by horsemen waving old rifles and burnouses
and Lawrence of Arabia stuff,
and the head shake would get off his horse and he and Allen would embrace
because they were old friends from Paris.
And then they would fly onto to India where Naru,
who was an old friend of the United States, would send his personal car
for his friend Allen Dulles.
So I mean he's a fascinating character.
So I hope that answers your question.
Please. Yes in the back.   >> Hello sir.

Thank you for the great book and lecture.
I'm from Georgetown and I agree that what you said that the progressive
in the 20s and 30s are different from today.
So my question is have you noticed some relevant, political,
social environment of today's world perhaps from Washington DC
or anywhere in the world that could foster the situation
that educate the next generation of progressive, which are different
from today's in Washington D.C.
who promote those ideas were not actually the progressive idea
that you were talking about.
>> James Srodes: Well yes I have and I will confess it once.
They aren't being generated in Washington.
It is interesting to me the number of institutions, many of them tied
to universities but some of them tied to think tanks and some
of them admittedly tied to special pleading lobby groups,
were an extraordinary number of young men
and women are being recruited and are being attracted
to various facets of foreign affairs,
and particularly environmentalism but also economic equality.
It's also interesting to me watching this current administration
as I have other administrations over the years,
to watch how people change their minds.
I see, maybe I'm being wishful, but I see a whole shift
in the American foreign policy attitude with the succession
of John Carey to the State Department.
I don't know what means.
I don't know what that means to President Obama's personal thinking
but it does mean there is a sea change going
on in America's posture in the world.
How we disengage from the two wars that we just fought and what we do
to confront the new threats that are all around us, so yes I have hope.
Not to be too cynical, as soon as we get the old crowd out
and get this new crowd in, maybe the better off we'll be
but not necessarily.   Yes mam.

>> You said that there was a joint presidency
between Eleanor and Franklin.   >> James Srodes: Yes I believe that.

>> And that Franklin could disavow Eleanor's ideas
when they didn't work out to
>> James Srodes: Oh that's just Eleanor, well what am I going to do?
>> Did she agree, did they have an agreement
that she would be the fall guy if things turned badly?
>> James Srodes: It was like most successful, unsuccessful marriages.
There was a lot tacit and not ever stated.
There was no contract but she's an interesting character
in her own right.
I mean all of these people have had their own biographies and Franklin
and Eleanor have a whole shelf.
Eleanor began her life as a very shy, [inaudible], insecure person
but for a number of reasons she developed her own persona,
her own voice.
Everybody forgets that while Roosevelt was fighting this
extraordinary battle to recover from Polio,
she found herself being thrust into the political arena by Louis Howe,
but then increasingly on her own as she-remember 1920 was when women got
to vote, and very shortly thereafter women began to assert themselves
in the traditional male political organizations
like the Democratic Party, and Eleanor found herself being one
of the important organizers of women in the Democratic party.
Then she began to develop her own voice and she began
to gather adherence, other women who were dedicated to her
and to her beliefs, and so by the time they reached Washington
in the presidency, she was an equal political partner.
As the presidency evolved and as his health failed
and as the world grew more complex in its demands on him,
she undertook much more than just-I didn't mean to denigrate
by just saying she did the social things,
she began a very important advisor on a number of things.
Often time to his annoyance because she never hesitated to interrupt him
and to chide him and to bring things to his attention
that maybe he didn't want to deal with right at the minute.
So he often yelled at her but she never yelled back and she soldiered
on and he, he relied on her to an extent
that I have not seen replicated since.
I find it unique, I find it remarkable and that's one
of the few times I'll concede that there are great people in history
but they don't often start off that way.
Tom?   >> Tom: You outlined the seeds

of the United Nations being planted years before it came to fruition,
in fact Eleanor Roosevelt [inaudible]
at that time explicitly thinking of human rights
and a declaration of human rights?
>> James Srodes: Were people thinking pre-war
or even during the early days of the war the question
of human rights in general?
Certainly there was a cohort within the progressive movement
that was advocating more civil liberties for women
for labor unions things like that, working conditions.
There was, I am sorry to concede, an almost, well almost initially,

fair ignorance and disinterest
in fostering the civil liberties of African Americans.
And there was a conflicted attitude,
particularly among the Jewish members of this group,
on the question of the state of Israel and the role of what
to do about European Jews.
There was enormous racial insensitivity, classic cases,
the [inaudible] of Japanese Americans.

So no, there it wasn't a keystone of the Progressive Movement,
sad to say, but it steadily began to evolve, particularly in the area
of race relations as African Americans became
so important in the war effort.
But it's-today's progressives wouldn't have a lot to say
and vice versa with the Lippmanns
and the Frankfurters of the 20s and 30s.
I'm sorry.   Yes mam.

>> [Inaudible]
>> James Srodes: Oh, very much so, yes.
>> [Inaudible]
>> James Srodes: Unfortunately he wasn't at Paris
so I had to disqualify him.
You know I picked these 12 because of that, that connection
and the house of truth and so on,
but I mean Roosevelt was surrounded by, you know,
a vast army of supporters and acolytes and aids and advisors
from McLeish here and speech writers and advocates and advisors,
Sam Rosenman, and of course Frankfurter
after he became a Supreme Court Justice,
violated his ethical resolve
by peppering Roosevelt with political advice.
It just, you could write, I could write another book but I'm not.
One last question?
Well again, thank you, thank the Library
of Congress for being what you are.   [ Applause ]

>> Tom Mann: Well I would like to personally like to thank James
for sharing not only the knowledge that he's accumulated and being able
to express itself, his knowledge and perspective on the world so well,
and I remind you that it's through kind of a book idea
that he explained to us, you know,
how he came about to write this book, which is a wonderful idea,
and how he did it so well and with such a perspective
that it illuminates, as you've expressed in your questions today,
the world ahead of us as well as the world he was describing.
It really was a wonderful experience to be here
and I want to thank you once again.
We're going to have a book signing right back here and you can talk
to him some more and let's conclude with another round of applause.
[Applause]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.