← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
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- [00:00]
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- [01:40]
Victor Davis Hanson
Hello everybody, this is Victor Davis Hansen. We're on the Victor Davis Hansen podcast. I'm. I'm solo today with one of our interviews. Jack Fowler will be with me next time and Sammy Wink. But I'm interviewing an old friend of mine, Michael Walsh, and I think you've known him. He's written about 16 books. Fiction, nonfiction, music, popular culture, and more recently, military history. And I think I have talked about on this podcast his most recent military history Last stands, why Men Fight When All Is Lost. It was a very successful book and now he's got. I don't know if it's a sequel, but it's a new book, it's just out and it's called A rage to conquer 12 battles that changed the Course of Western History. And I want to remind everybody that Michael, for 16 or 17 years, was a Times foreign correspondent for Time magazine and a music critic. He divides his time between Connecticut and Ireland. Welcome, Michael, to the show.
- [02:43]
Michael Walsh
Very happy to be Victor. It's a real pleasure and an honor to be with you. I have to tell say right off the bat that without you, these military history books would never have been written. You were kind enough when I showed you the first outline for Last Stands. I think we were on a boat somewhere to Hawaii or Alaska or someplace, and you encouraged me to do it. And I'm very happy that I'm able to write in a field in which you're an acknowledged master and have had some success.
- [03:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, thank you, everybody. You know, I want to just preface. There has been this great genre, and it's a 19th century genre, great battles of the 15 battles of the world by Crecy or J.C. fuller, who was the architect of British armor tactics and finally, unfortunately, became kind of a Nazi sympathizer. But he wrote Great Battles of the Western World. I wrote Carnage and Culture about decisive battles that illustrated Western. So it's a genre. But, Michael, you've done something a little different, I think, and unique in that. You didn't just go back and do the regular Salamis or Thermopylae or D Day. You. You've got some unique selections, and they include Philosophy or Anal Switzerland. They. They have fiction about Achilles. And then they. They don't always. They don't always reflect a battle that you might associate with, say, Caesar. Alesia was a critical battle, but we don't hear much about it. But yet that's one of your key battles. Just very briefly, what was the rationale or how did you make these decisions that include fiction, nonfiction, and battles that maybe the reader hadn't really experienced in this genre before?
- [04:39]
Michael Walsh
Well, thank you for that question, because when I started Last Dance, I, as you know, Victor and my readers know, I grew up in the United States Marine Corps, and my father was. It is. He's almost 99 years old now, a veteran of the Chosen Reservoir. He was a member of the 2 5, which is the most decorated regiment in Marine history. And he is, I would guess, the last of the chosen few. And in fact, he believes that he was the last Marine out of the reservoir as they. As they moved south and went towards the sea. He never talked about that battle when we were kids, even though my brother later went into the Navy and became retired as a commander in the Navy. It just wasn't a part of our childhood. So when I got the idea of writing a book about warfare, and then I thought, well, Last Stands would be interesting because most people know, obviously Thermopylae or Custer, but they might not know or consider other battles to be Last Dance. And so I opened. The point is I opened a wide cultural lens on it. I wanted to do not just the battle. The battle often gets described in a. In a paragraph or two, such as the Milvian Bridge, which is a very important battle in the history of Western civilization that no one ever thinks about. Anyway, I then realized I had a last stand in my own family, which is my dad. And so the concluding chapter of that was I. I went to Florida and sat down, put a microphone in front of him and said, tell me what happened that during those two or three days at the reservoir. And that book, which you were kind enough to endorse, became big bestseller for Macmillan St Martin's and then they asked for a second one. So I decided this time I take the same technique, which is to look at all cultural aspects of war, that I wouldn't just look at war as a purely independent thing that has no effect on anything else. But where did it come from? Where did it go? What were the thoughts behind it? So, for example, in the chapter on Napoleon, which I'm very proud of, in this book, which focuses on Austerlitz, which everybody knows about Austerlitz, but now, why I bring everybody into the party. Goethe, Beethoven, who dedicated the Third Symphony to Napoleon at this exact moment, his effect on Byron, for example, the poet, and Franz Liszt, the pianist, and a whole generation of Romantic heroes. I argue that Napoleon really is the first Romantic hero. He is the embodiment of what Goethe was writing about, and asked for a meeting in Erfurt or Jena after the Battle of Jena, asked for a meeting with Goethe because Napoleon was not just a military man, he'd started out as a novelist monqui. He brought the Comedie Francaise to Germany with him during this negotiations to show that the French had an appreciation for civilization. So I thought, okay, why did this battle happen and one of the military points behind it? But also, why did these two forces collide? And also I found, as I was writing both Last Stands and A Rage to Conquer, that commanders run into the same situations all the time. So, for example, and this is one, we can talk without too much technical detail, it seems to me that at Gaugamela, Alexander puts out his usual poison pawn out on the right so he can pull the Persian line far to the right, and then he comes across with a right cross to the jaw and finishes the fight almost the way Mike Tyson would. And in Austerlitz, Napoleon does something similar with the Protzen Heights. Makes a feint, captures it, retreats it, pulls their troops over. And Aetius, at the Battle of the Catalonian Plagues, does the same thing with the Visigoths, puts them out on the hill, and then they're able to come in later on and be dispositive So I thought, wow, this is very interesting. And you mentioned the Battle of Alesia, which it is funny to me that nobody talks about it since literally the culminating battle of the Gallic Wars. In that battle, Caesar is, he's attacking a walled city and he builds a wall around it and then he builds another wall around himself as the Celts come and attack from the backside. And then I realized that's the same situation Beaumont of Toronto was in at Antioch in the year 1198, I guess the battle, yeah, 1098, the battle of Antioch. And he's just emulating in a way Caesar too. And he does, and he fixes it the same way by breaking out at the point where he can bring the most force he has, which is almost nothing on the weakest part of the much superior force. And if he can crack that, as Caesar knew about the Gauls and as, yeah, Caesar knew about the Gauls and as, as Bowman knew about the Turks, if you cracked them, they'd run. And once they started to run, they'd break. And that they didn't have enough structural discipline. They weren't like Romans that they would fill a breach in their lines. They think all was lost and quit. So both those battles end the same way and they're in the exact same circumstance. I just find that really interesting.
- [10:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, it, it is. We're going to take a quick break and hear some something from our sp and we'll be right back.
- [10:30]
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- [13:35]
Victor Davis Hanson
And we're right back with Michael Walsh and we're discussing his new book about critical battles in every aspect of the social life, political life, diplomacy. I want to turn to one of the chapters I was very interested in when I first read it and that was chapter nine. It's kind of a tripartite. Pershing at St. Mihiel, Nimitz at Midway, Patton at the Bulge. All of them. It seemed to me that they all have this and I guess that was one of the themes. They all have this American strain that people have underestimated American commanders to the European. And they all were brilliant or at least quite unusually good, especially Patton at the Bulge. But Nimitz at Midway, even though he wasn't there himself, he was kind of the architect of the battle. And the whole I wrote about it in Carnage and Culture. The whole idea they could bring the Yorktown and shut down the grid in Hawaii and fix it after the Battle of Coral Sea and get it. It was just an amazing story. And I think that was one of your. That was one of. I think for readers that are versed in World War II, that'll be one of the most interesting chapters for them.
- [14:56]
Michael Walsh
Yeah, I wanted to point out that the Americans were undervalued. And why I put Pershing in there is, first of all, he was German like Nimitz was. In fact, our Germans basically beat their Germans, essentially.
- [15:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
That's what Hitler said. Hitler said, I only lost the war because they took all of our Germans.
- [15:12]
Michael Walsh
They had all the best Germans. Right. But Pershing, you know, grew up Felsching was his name, speaking German. Nimitz spoke German until World War I. That was his Nate, literally his native language in Texas. Patton was not a German, but he certainly dealt with them. But I wanted to do a chapter on the Americans to show that the American military, which was widely disparaged at the beginning of World War I. It was Pershing who said, no, we're not going to just fill in the lines for the French. You guys have been chopping yourself up for four years. And we're here to win this and end it. And at Samuel and at the Argonne Ardennes rather, and other battles. Our entry into the war ended that war within three or four months, really, once those battles were engaged. So I wanted to say something about the Americans. And that's why I concluded this book with the 911 chapter which is the most controversy of these. Because we lost the battle of 911 and we're still dealing with the effects of that defeat in a way that we have not quite fully embraced or recognized. And when people say to me, well, what do you mean we lost a battle of 9 11? I say, have you been to the airport recently? Do you take your shoes off? Do you shuffle through a line? Are you pushed around by thugs wearing uniforms? The only reason you're doing that is because we lost the battle of 9 11.
- [16:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
And so if you add in the October invasion a month later or less than a month later of Afghanistan and after 20 years how that misadventure ended with a billion dollar embassy. Yeah, sacrament just abandoned.50 billion in equipment abandoned to terrorists. The Baglam Air Force Base had just been remodeled. Abandoned. Well, we forgot misadventure.
- [17:03]
Michael Walsh
We've forgotten the lessons. This book opens with a long essay on Clausewitz. And because I am fluent in German, I decided I would read the famous first chapter of Von Kriega and German. And I've noticed one thing is that there's this mistranslation of the whole cliche that war is basically politics by other means. But he doesn't say by other. He never says that. He says mit mit with other means. And I argue that war is not a proof that diplomacy has failed. War, and Clausewitz says, and I agree with him, is a tool by which you continue to pursue policy. You just pursue it with bloodshed, with force. And we've become so prissy in our attitudes towards these things that we find that would be rude to actually, really, really fight a war to win it. As you know, Victor Patton would consider this just an absurd development in American history.
- [18:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, he was. I remember when Colin Powell, who wasn't a Patton like figure, but nonetheless, at the outset of the 90 Gulf War, they asked him what his was to deal with this supposedly formidable Republican Guard, which wasn't very formidable, as it turned out, but he said, we're going to isolate it, surround it and destroy it. And everybody got angry and they thought, oh my gosh, why would we want to destroy all those people? And then the highway of death, which really wasn't a highway of death, if you look at the actual cat. I mean, it was grotesque, but it wasn't tens of thousands of people incinerated that we bombed. But it was. We've kind of. I guess what I got from your chapter on Klaus, which is this classical idea that is prevalent through Western thought and literature, military literature, that you have to defeat the enemy, humiliate the enemy if you want to make them, if you want them to be politically aligned or subservient to your political agenda, there's no other way to do it. And you can't put the political agenda before, if they're resistant, military defeat. And we knew that in World War II. I don't know whether the nuclear age, Michael, and the fear of escalation to DEFCON 1, or what you've kind of hinted at throughout the book, the therapeutic mindset that has taken over. But we, we try to impose political solutions, but on people who don't feel in any way they're defeated. And that's. That's hard to do.
- [19:36]
Michael Walsh
That's correct. Caesar was, as you know, famous for his magnanimity after he won, not before he had won. And that cost him his life because he forgave Brutus and Brutus killed, literally killed him, delivered the last sword blow.
- [19:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
So he always had on every corner, he had Clementia, Caesar, the clemency of. Since he was pretty tough, unless you agreed that you were beaten by him.
- [20:02]
Michael Walsh
Yeah, I think the point is Americans have to come back to the notion the enemy has to know he's defeated. And this is something that won the Civil War with Grant and Sherman, that you can have all of the kindness to the enemy after the enemy has acknowledged that he is defeated and has stopped fighting. Otherwise you get these eternal, forever wars. And one of the reasons we're in a forever war is we did not defeat. We did not name the enemy in 9 11, which is not. It wasn't even Saudi Arabia. It's Islam. Islam had declared war on us in the fact that there's no Pope of Islam. And any one of these muftis can make a pronouncement. And Bin Laden had declared war on the United States. And we refused to accept it. We said, you don't really mean it. Then when he did, we didn't act like he meant it. And so we let them up off the table. And I just think the history of America is very sad from 2001 to the present because of our inability to deal with it.
- [21:06]
Victor Davis Hanson
And it's. We have this tendency with these figures, and that's why I like your discussion of patent, that we kind of put in the closet and forget about. And then we get an extremist and we say, maybe we should bring out William Tecumseh Sherman, who's kind of bipolar, or this guy with a drinking problem called Grant. Or we'll bring out crazy George Patton that we didn't really want to make a brigadier general until he was 55. Or we'll bring out Nutty Curtis LeMay who flew 25 missions at the front of a squadron of B17 to run the B29 program. And then they do these spectacular things. They win the war. And as they win the war, we start to turn attention, given the laxity and the margin of error we've now had. And we start to say, I can't believe that Patton slapped somebody. I can't believe that Patton said the Russians were the real enemy after the war. I cannot believe Curtis LeMay said that he would be a war criminal if he lost the war. The Japanese would put him on trial for firebombing their industrial heartland.
- [22:11]
Michael Walsh
Yeah.
- [22:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
And then. And then we kind of despise them. And then every then we get in these jams again and we say, where is Patton? Where is Sherman? Where is. But kind of like the Western, you know, Shane.
- [22:21]
Michael Walsh
Yeah.
- [22:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
Ethan Edwards and the Searchers. We have these guys that come out of nowhere and they have these skill sets that we don't have. And then they solve the cattle baron problem or find Natalie Wood. And then at the end of the movie, we think, see, you wouldn't want to be you. Get out.
- [22:35]
Michael Walsh
No, we literally at the end of searches, close the door on him. Yeah, right. Thanks and goodbye.
- [22:42]
Victor Davis Hanson
And we do that with our military commanders, too.
- [22:46]
Michael Walsh
Oh, we do. It's terrible. I love the thing that Sherman said about his relationship with Grant is that he said, I stood by him when he was drunk, and he stood by me when I was crazy.
- [22:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
That was great. He said that after the battle.
- [22:58]
Michael Walsh
Yeah.
- [22:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
Shiloh and Halleck, who was a complete mediocrity, wanted to get rid of Grant. But I just. I think that was one of the things. After reading your chapter again, whatever we think about what's going on in the military, there is. And it's sometimes haphazard and poorly explained, but there is a tendency now to get away from the therapeutic di and get back to battle readiness. And I hope that effort, if it is that effort, will start to recognize eccentrics and people who want to win wars, and not just beltway political officers that are attached to the National Security Council or then they go into this and that, but they're not actual field commanders that want to win.
- [23:46]
Michael Walsh
Well, we went through this in the Civil War. You had all these political generals like Halleck, whom you mentioned, and then Grant was up. Had already retired because he wasn't. His career was going nowhere. Like Patton, his career was going nowhere. And then he comes back and. And he has to deal with moving the political generals aside and getting war fighters. So that's why he takes a crate. Literally. A crazy person like Sherman, who had been institutionalized, I believe, at one point, or was certainly threatened with institutionalization.
- [24:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, they put him. They don't know if they had a mental institution then. But for a year, he was without a command. The Cincinnati observer said that Sherman had lost his mind.
- [24:27]
Michael Walsh
Yeah.
- [24:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
And they predicated on that. When he said, before this thing is over, we're going to have to kill 400,000 of these Cavaliers in the South. He was almost. He underestimated it, but he was the only person that saw it was going to be an extensive war. We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back with Michael Walsh and this brilliant book he's written, A Rage to Conquer.
- [24:51]
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- [26:01]
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- [27:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
So we're back now with Michael. I want to make another comment on the book. It's very well written. Michael is a literary artist, and that's very important in military history. I was thinking as I was reading this, I got to know John Keegan very well, and one of the things that made him a great military historian was his prose style and his able his ability to really capture what it was like at that particular moment. Another person who was a biographer, he's been superseded in the series of biographies by Patton. But Ladislaw Farago wrote a key no footnotes, just beautiful prose. It was called Ordeal and Triumph, a biography of George Patton. Ordeal and Triumph. And it was based. That was what the movie was based on. But all the other subsequent biographies are more detailed, they have more information, they're heavily footnoted, especially Carlo Dieste's Patent A Genius for War, which is a brilliant. But no one writes like him. And I think that's one of your strengths of these two books, Michael. You put a lot of effort, natural effort, in trying to capture the reader and bring them into the landscape of battle.
- [29:08]
Michael Walsh
Well, thank you for that. I would say this for. You mentioned Keegan. I read Keegan's book on the Mask of Command, the fourth standard volume of analyses, in which he discusses the notion of the commander in the front. Always, sometimes, never. And so we have commanders who do all of. All of those things throughout this book. But literally when I started to write this book, Adam Bellow was the acquiring editor at St. Martin's and he said, I don't want to draw history. Write it like you write your fiction. Just make this like. Like you write a movie, make this come alive. I really want to feel these things. And so that was the challenge that Adam, to whom I'm very grateful.
- [29:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
I like that. I did eight books with him when he was the editor of eight in a row at Free Press. He was kind of a boy wonder in his. Those days.
- [30:03]
Michael Walsh
Well, he's a great, great American editor. Obviously he has the right lineage. I was. I was lucky enough to be a colleague of his dad at Boston University, briefly. So I got to know Saul a little bit in his old age, and he had some very memorable things to say about being a writer. And one of them that. That stuck with me forever. We were at a party with the president of the university and Saul and his wife and me and Kate and who I guess one other professor was there. And the president said to me, michael, what's it like being a writer? And I said, well, you know, you have a Nobel prize winning author sitting right next to me while we ask him. And Saul said, it's like this. He spoke very tersely. He spoke with this kind of Chicago rat, a tap, tap rhythm. He said, it's like a building in Chicago under construction. You go there with your lunch, you go up the elevator to the 110th floor, you walk out, you drill your rivets, you eat your lunch, you finish your job, you go back down the elevator and then you do it again the next day. That's what being a writer is like. And I thought that was absolutely perfect. Because it requires, as you know, you've done a bazillion books. This is my 20th now conquest published book. It's discipline. It really is discipline.
- [31:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
I used to, when I first started, I always thought, why would somebody kind of gear themselves to I'm going to write three or four thousand words today. And then I started to talk to authors. Andrew Roberts, I used to talk to him. I know Andrew Willie well, he's at the Hoover Institution. And yeah, he has a complete discipline. He gets up very early in the morning. He has. Not that it's an absolute quota, but he has a general idea of how many words he has to make. It is like kind of engineering. When you look at, you say you have a deadline of a year or two years and then you see how many words they want and then you, you know how much you have to do per day. It's very.
- [32:07]
Michael Walsh
Absolutely.
- [32:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
And then it's absolutely. It's kind of like an onion. You write it and then you know, you have to. If you're going to do footnotes, you got to go back and you've got to. And then you've got to look for pro style. Then you've got to look for. And you just keep adding layers to it.
- [32:20]
Michael Walsh
And that's the truth.
- [32:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's a very disciplined.
- [32:23]
Michael Walsh
If people look at my writer's desk and they think they're going to find all kinds of notes and inspirational sayings and stuff, all they see is a page that has numbers on it. The date, the number, the date and the number. So you calculate how far is it from today to when you want that first draft word count done and then you know how much it is. And then you're always aware of where you are in the process because you can't hit a five run homer. You can't write 100,000 word book in an afternoon. You just have to be able to get up there and drill those rivets and then go back home, go to sleep, get up and drill those rivets again.
- [33:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
That's really important, especially as you get older. I know that when I had a four book and six year contract with basic the second world wars and then the dying citizen and then the end of everything. And I did this Trump book, but I had to. I would talk to my daughter about it and she'd say, well, how many hours? She would ask questions, you know, how many hours does it take? And I said, well, 40 hours a week or maybe 30 if you're doing other things. And then 52 weeks or 1500, maybe two years, 3000. And then she said things, well, what does that do to your body to sit there for 3,000? I said, well, you have to get up every hour or you have to. But it, as you get older, you're kind of in a dilemma as a writer because you, you know, more, you've done it before, you're more experienced, but the powers of recall and your physicality to do that, to sit there. And that's why I really admired people in their 80s. Jacques Barzon, you know, dawn and Deccans. Oh my God, he wrote that. I don't know how he did it.
- [34:05]
Michael Walsh
I have no idea. Right. He was 112 years old at the time he wrote that book. It's absolutely amazing.
- [34:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
Writing required. When I was young, I just said, well, yeah, I'll do this book. What you want. 100 and 200,000 words. The other Greeks, I can do it, I can do it and you can, but you've got to be much more disciplined and scientific in the way you approach that.
- [34:25]
Michael Walsh
Well, it's like that country and western song, you know. I'm not as good as I once was, but one time I'm as good as I ever was. Was.
- [34:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
Let me ask you ways we're running a little bit out of time, Michael. So you've got these two books, Last Stands A Rage to Conquer. What is your next project? And is it going to be with St. Martin's and Adam Bellow or what are you thinking of?
- [34:44]
Michael Walsh
Well, Adam's left St. Martin's but I, I, but I'm still there and I have a wonderful editor named Michael Flamini there now and they've already bought and, and paid front money for the third book in this series which is going to be called the Wrath of God and it's about religious warfare. And, and I think I was kind of heading in that in the long chapter on Constantine, for example, in Rage to Conquer. It's really about the foundation of Christianity and the battle between Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Arianism and the early heretics and.
- [35:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
How that manifests itself on the battlefield.
- [35:20]
Michael Walsh
Yes, it, it certainly did.
- [35:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
I have a student. I don't know if you ever, there's on one aspect of that, my student, he was a, he was actually Mr. Los Angeles. He was about 6, 5 and he was a weight. Raymond Abraham and he wrote Sword and Scimitar.
- [35:35]
Michael Walsh
Oh yes, yes, I've read him.
- [35:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. And he wrote the Bin Laden Reader, had a new book out on. But it's not just about all that area. You're doing on all religious tensions, but it's kind of a creasy book. Great battles between Islam and Christianity.
- [35:53]
Michael Walsh
Yeah, I'm going to mention that, but that's not the main focus of it. For example, I'm really going to start with the Israelites and the Canaanites.
- [35:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah.
- [36:00]
Michael Walsh
So history's first recorded genocide. Actually, if you listen to what the Lord God tells the ancient Israelites to do to the Canaanites, and from this starting point all else will flow. I'm interested as I look back at the religious nature of warfare, at how coterminous so many of these things are. That is to say, the Old Testament, the earliest Hebrew scriptures are roughly contemporaneous with Hesiod and Homer. Roughly the Augustus going from the citizen to emperor happens at the exact same time Jesus goes from nobody to God. You see these parallels between temporal and spiritual world. One of the battles I want to do in Wrath of God is the Albigensian Crusade, which people don't know about. This is an inter Christian thing in which the famous expression kill them all, let God sort them out for whence we get that at the Battle of Bezier. So I want to again, like I did with Ridge, take some battles that are famous and some battles that you've never heard of, but make the argument they're important. Like for example, I was when I did Last Dance, I did Shiloh, which we talked about earlier.
- [37:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes.
- [37:22]
Michael Walsh
As a last stand. And it was in the. In this sense that if they had lost, that war was already over before it had begun.
- [37:31]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. Albert Sidney Johnson would have been in which Shiloh. You're talking the Civil War. Shy.
- [37:36]
Michael Walsh
Yeah, well, both sides. Albert Sidney Johnson wouldn't have died. Right.
- [37:40]
Victor Davis Hanson
He wouldn't. You know what's funny about one thing about being an author is that you can never tell the books that you like writing or you think are good are going to appeal.
- [37:51]
Michael Walsh
Yeah.
- [37:52]
Victor Davis Hanson
And. And I wrote a book called Ripples of Battle about four battles antiquity. The Battle of Delium, the Battle of Shiloh, Battle of Okinawa. And I did it. The ripples were in literature. So on say Shiloh, I pointed out that Ben Hur was actually an allegory of what happened to Lew Wallace. Gratis in the novel is actually Grant and the Mist Road was sort of the tile that fell down and ruined his career. New Wallace. Just like Ben Hur has put out in the wilderness.
- [38:27]
Michael Walsh
Exactly.
- [38:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
And then I talked about the lost cause came from the lost battle and the lost battle with Shiloh. And I went through all of Contemporary Southern literature said if Albert Sidney had not just been shot behind the knee with that invisible wound and he was leading the charge at the crust of the battle, we would have won. We lost Scheidel, then we lost the war, but we really didn't. It was just fate. And that was a very pernicious idea in the post war.
- [38:53]
Michael Walsh
Well, you've been very eloquent about the lost cause thing, for sure. But I was also thinking that Grant was on shaky ground with Halleck at that point anyway. And Sherman was completely untrusted. And they got caught with their pants down on day one, where the Confederates overran and pushed them all the way back to the river. And had Grant lost that, we never would have had Grant. He would have been gone. He would have been cashier.
- [39:18]
Victor Davis Hanson
No. And I think. And Sherman only had 7,000 men. He was wounded. Well, wounded. He got shot in the hand. He got a shot in the leather strap on his shoulder.
- [39:29]
Michael Walsh
Right.
- [39:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
But he. He wrote a good. A weird letter. And he said, I woke up after the battle. I had no idea would be a national hero, because he was the one that withdrew slowly and kind of a rock. And that the Confederates lapped around and they had that famous nighttime conversation when he.
- [39:45]
Michael Walsh
No, that's wonderful.
- [39:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, lick him tomorrow.
- [39:50]
Michael Walsh
That's great for you.
- [39:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
That. That was a very. There was more people. Not that it compared at all in terms of the dead of Gettysburg and Antietam, but it had. That was something that shocked the nation that had never seen for, I think 4200.
- [40:04]
Michael Walsh
It was also interesting to me that there was a lot of writers.
- [40:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, there were.
- [40:09]
Michael Walsh
Spears was there, I think, And James.
- [40:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
Garfield was there presently.
- [40:15]
Michael Walsh
And Stanley of Stanley Livingston fame was there.
- [40:18]
Victor Davis Hanson
He was there. And the explorer of the Colorado River, I'm trying to remember his name, he was there. And it really made Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was an obscure. No one listened to him. But after the ballot, fallen timbers at the retreat, no one can really figure out if he really did it, if he charged right into the Union army, picked up a Union soldier with one hand, used him as a shield, and then he got shot in the stomach, rode back. And after that, he became not just an obscure former slave trader, but the mastermind of cavalry tactics for the Confederacy.
- [40:53]
Michael Walsh
Yeah.
- [40:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
But it was all. All these careers were made and lost at Shiloh.
- [40:58]
Michael Walsh
Well, I think the point I make in Bridge to Conquer at the beginning is that war is the. I bet I say this in the first two sentences or so is the principal agent of social change. It makes things Happen. Like, I woke up the next morning and I was famous. And Byron said that famously of Child Harold. When it came out, he said, I went to bed one night, I woke up the next morning, I was famous. Because fortunes can turn overnight, but in war, they literally turn overnight. And with Shiloh, you saw that happen.
- [41:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
And I think what happens in war, time is compressed. So, you know, the United States goes saying that we can't afford a fourth carrier, and then we make 125 light escort and fleet carriers with no problem, or we. We turn out 100,000 fighters, and we are. We start inventing napalm or the atomic bomb, and it just makes people go into a frenzy. And you bring all these people out of the woodwork that under normal times, they may be too eccentric or they may be written off as unorthodox, and then they're allowed to flourish because of this extra. This extremities.
- [42:11]
Michael Walsh
Yes.
- [42:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
And you really. Time really goes fast and you really get talent. And great and evil things happen because people are not sleeping nine hours a day. They're working like crazy.
- [42:23]
Michael Walsh
Well, why don't they. They. After the Coral Sea, they turned the Yorktown around in three days, didn't they? I.
- [42:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
They did, and they had.
- [42:30]
Michael Walsh
They thought it was going to take months.
- [42:31]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. And they told everybody in Honolulu, there's been a outage. You're not going to have power for 21. And they just cut off all of the grid and used it to weld. And on the way to Midway, they were still, you know, welding panels.
- [42:44]
Michael Walsh
Well, it's the naysayers, and we're seeing this right now with the Trump tariffs, whether you think they're a good idea or not. He's only. It's only been 24, 48 hours. And from one chorus, which is actually two choruses, is saying, this is impossible. It'll never work. Here's the proof. Look at the stock market. Oh, my God. And then you think it's Eisenhower saying, what are we going to do about Baston? And Pat pipes up, says, I could be there with three divisions in 48 hours, or whatever he said. And they didn't believe him, but he did.
- [43:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
And it's even weirder to read the Wall Street Journal every day. And they can't finish an article without either trashing Trump's tariffs or quoting Smoot Hawley and he's going to cause a recession. And then you look at. You go back and read about Moot Hawley. And it was 1930, a year and a half after the melt, a Year after the meltdown, it wasn't enacted for another two years. And the people who caused the Great Depression was Wall Street.
- [43:54]
Michael Walsh
Right.
- [43:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
And the tariff wasn't even anything resembling Trump's tariff. It was a crazy tariff. But at that time, we had one of the largest trade surpluses in the United States, and it was 45 to 50%. It was a preemptive. This is, I don't even think these are tariffs. They're just basically saying, tariff policy is in your hands. China, it's in your hands. Europe and Mexico, whatever you want to do is fine with us, but we're not going to allow you to be asymmetrical. If you want to be symmetrical, we'll be symmetrical. Whatever you want, you say no tariffs, 10%, 30. It doesn't matter to us, but we're going to do exactly what you're doing. The only problem I have with it is I don't think they're messaging it enough. They don't get that out. You know, and I wish somebody in the administration would come out and say, well, if tariffs are so horrible, why are they so popular in Europe and Japan and China? Are these people insane? Are they trying to destroy their economies? Because India or China has twice the economic GDP per year growth than we do, and they have these tariffs that are, so what's the deal? Or if somebody came out and just said, well, Mexico went from 10 to 20 to 50 to 80 to 100, 150 to $177 billion trade surplus with us, is that hurting them? And then the next thing we know, they're sending 63 billion in cash back to Mexico, mostly from illegal aliens, and the cartels add another 20 or 30 billion. Is that good for us, that 250 billion leave the country? And if it's so bad for Mexico, why are they, why do they seem to enjoy it so much? But they never, they need to put it in that context and explain.
- [45:40]
Michael Walsh
Well, I think the real key, this all comes down to leadership. And again, having grown up in the Marines, which is a very, almost said, very unique, it's certainly a unique way to grow up as a young man in the United States. There's an ethos to being raised by an Irish Catholic, Jesuit educated Marine Corps officer. And you know the type I'm talking about, because there's plenty of them. And it for he forced you, continues to do so to me, forces you to think your position through. And he would. The dinner table would be Socratic interrogations of, of what you thought and why you thought It. And, and, and that. And never. Did you get rewarded, I must say. I talked with him just the other day and he said, well, I. He's from Boston, so he speaks his New England accent. I, I read your book. He said. I said, oh, really? And he said, yeah. He said, I thought it was one of your better ones. I said, thanks, Dad. I really appreciate the endorsement. Yeah.
- [46:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
Very lucky to have your father. That was one of my biggest losses in life. My. The early death of my father and mother. And I worship. Mother died of a brain tumor at 66 and my father died prematurely of a stroke at 74. But they were wonderful people. That's. So it's very important to show gratitude, I think, in this culture of ours, because. No.
- [47:08]
Michael Walsh
Yeah.
- [47:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
We never pay. I mean, we always use the morality of the present to condemn the people who gave us this wonderful country and bounty and affluence, but we never honor them. We never think, look at the material world they had to live in. I mean, I had a ruptured appendix in Libya. I would be dead if there wasn't somebody in Libya that learned about Western medicine to do an emergency appendectomy.
- [47:34]
Michael Walsh
Yeah.
- [47:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
I've had three kidneys. I'm so happy that. And so grateful for what medicine has done. And all those people who suffered horribly in the physical world. And we have the gumption to go back and use, you know, you were racist, you were xenophobic, you were homophobic. And we apply all these standards of a material, affluent society. Yeah.
- [47:54]
Michael Walsh
Well, that's what's called presentism now.
- [47:57]
Victor Davis Hanson
It is through on your book. I think it's really important.
- [48:02]
Michael Walsh
Yeah.
- [48:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
That you do have this reverence. And you don't you try to imagine what these people were up against at these particular times rather than just saying this was a stupid thing to do or this. That. That's very important, I think, in the historian.
- [48:15]
Michael Walsh
Yeah. I think it's important to remember these guys are just guys like us get up every day, put their pants on one leg at a time. They really are. And they had their insecurities and certainly they have their imperfections, but they had. And they all share this quality of basically this must and will be done. Alia yakta est. That's it. We're not going to go back on it. We're not going to second guess it. We're going to win or die trying. And, and that's.
- [48:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
Are you saying, Michael, that Caesar didn't say the die is cast? Maybe, sort of. Kind of.
- [48:50]
Michael Walsh
No. Kind of. And. And you know that river's not that deep anyway and we can always turn around and go back and she's, maybe France wouldn't be a bad place for me to spend my retirement after all. And no, they didn't hedge their beds, you know, bets. They, they burned their ships, you know, like the Spanish conquistadores and in, in Mexico.
- [49:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes.
- [49:11]
Michael Walsh
So we've lost.
- [49:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
Let me take a final break and we're going to come back for a final three or four minutes with Michael Walsh. And I urge everybody to buy a rage to conquer. It's just out. It's the sequel to Last Stands, which was a bestseller and it's a prequel to a new book on religious tensions and wars that Michael is now writing. And we'll be right back. Find yourself looking for a new job or change in career? Monster.com is here to help. We are not only here to bring you job postings, but also AI interview prep and salary tools, expert career advice and top notch resume services. We've got everything you need to land your perfect job fit. Discover the magic of finding the ideal job with monster.com. your future starts now. Visit monster.com today. Your next job opportunity is just a click away. Thank you everybody. We're back here for our final segment, a few minutes with Michael Walsh. Any last observations, Michael, on military history in general or this trilogy? Do you have plans to have them reissued as a series or something that people could find them?
- [50:25]
Michael Walsh
Well, I don't know. I was very pleased that the Easton Press picked up Last Stands and did a special edition of that, you know, the collector's books. And I'm hopeful they'll, they'll do the same with Rage. But after I finished Wrath of God, I'm in the middle of writing a big novel and I'd be big. I like to tell people it's going to be twice as long as War and Peace, but twice as funny as War and Peace too, in which I'm basically writing about the history of the world from the near future to the day the universe was born and using historical personages coming in and out of it. It's all still, it's not in coed. I've written down a lot of it already in terms of outlining and who the characters are and what the points are. But it's a work of history that will be semi fiction. I'm not sure it's any one single genre.
- [51:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
Do you write books simultaneously or are you going to wait to.
- [51:23]
Michael Walsh
Not normally, no. But this novel's been bugging me. So at Times I just need to do that and I do it and then I. Because it's two different kinds of writing. Very much different kinds of writing, different part of your brain. Different. Different.
- [51:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
When you're writing now, are you traveling as well or did you just say I'm going to stay put?
- [51:43]
Michael Walsh
Well, I did a six months in Europe in part to chase some of the characters in the novel just to be where. I'm very much a method writer. I like to go where they. Where they are and see what they saw insofar as that's possible. But right now I'm holed up up here in the New England woods for a while and I've outfitted my house in Ireland now with the same computer and the same everything, so I don't really have to worry about. Did I bring the files with me.
- [52:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
And do you do public. I. I've noticed that as I got older, I. I'm saying no to public speaking because it disrupt. You have a schedule of writing. I'm writing more, I think, but the idea of getting on the today's air. Do you. Are you still getting out there and traveling all over?
- [52:27]
Michael Walsh
Not very well. I'm not. No one's asking me for one thing, so. And nowadays, you know, you do book tours like we're doing.
- [52:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't know if that's true. I think I saw you most recently on the Hillsdale cruise.
- [52:38]
Michael Walsh
Yeah, but that was a few years ago. Yeah, they've lost my phone ever since then, I think. But no, I do think that I've got to stay put and finish Wrath of God. I'm not going to do anything except watch.
- [52:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think that's. Yeah, I'm going to try to do that as well. Stay put. I stopped all travel after June 1st.
- [52:56]
Michael Walsh
It is. I'd like to make this point to the young writers who are listening to us. It is very physically demanding and it doesn't seem to be. It seems like you're just sitting on your ass or reading a book. But the toll it takes. I'm at 75. I turned 75 in October. I feel it much, much more than I did 10 years ago. For sure.
- [53:15]
Victor Davis Hanson
I do too. My wife said the other day to me, we're watching a movie on tv. You should see your posture. You're on your. You know, you're all lying in a weird position. You're typing, typing, typing. Then you're stopping and looking at them. This is not good. This is why you get the flu or Covid. You've got to be. And she's right. You've gotta, you're riding and then stop and take a break and stop. But when you, when you're riding all the time, you know, on the plane or stressed out about connections or it's not good. And yeah, I'm late to the game of learning that and well, I think.
- [53:52]
Michael Walsh
Guys like us only learn the hard way. I think that's the thing.
- [53:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
I know it. I know she said to me not too long ago, you7 operations and they were all. I said and the nice thing about them, they were all preventable if I had just listened, listened to what was going on. But I was.
- [54:07]
Michael Walsh
Well, I think you've got many, you have many more books left in you too. I, I read the end of everything in, in Hungary, actually, while I was, I took a month and I was the writer in residence at the Danube Institute in Budapest and that was the.
- [54:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
Much maligned Victor Orban.
- [54:25]
Michael Walsh
I have not met Mr. Orban yet, but I am looking forward to. I do know a lot of the people in his cabinet and I was fortunate that David Goldman, my dear friend, was in town and we were able to. And I gave a piano recital which I haven't done for years, and I'm now going to give concerts this year in London and Budapest again. So I'm.
- [54:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
Do you think keeping that travel and getting these things keep you going healthy mentally?
- [54:55]
Michael Walsh
And I haven't played in public for such a long time and it's really great because it's just something.
- [55:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
How long were you the actual music critic for?
- [55:04]
Michael Walsh
Well, I was a music critic for 25 years, 22 newspapers and TIME magazine. And then because by sheer dumb luck and also I see it coming, I was in the East Germany and the Soviet Union between 85 and 91. So from the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, which I was present at when Honaker and, and our friend Vladimir Putin showed up to that party back then. And then 91 was the end of the Soviet Union and I left just before the coup against Gorbachev. So I think at that point I decided I was really going to get much more involved in this sort of, of life and I'm glad I did.
- [55:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, that's fascinating. Okay, we're, we're. I kept mount Michael for almost an hour. I didn't but it was fascinating. Michael and I want to ask all of our readers to go to. Michael, do you have a website or do you, where do you, where do you direct people to buy a rage to conquer?
- [56:03]
Michael Walsh
Well, it's, it's on Amazon. But I, I have been running a website called the pipeline, the hyphen pipeline.org which commissioned works from writers for the last, we ran it for four or five years and now it's really turning into my personal thing. So I'm going to do one, one column a week on Monday and then one interview with somebody.
- [56:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
How do we get to the Pipeline? If I turn on my computer, what's.
- [56:28]
Michael Walsh
The hyphen pipeline.org okay.
- [56:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
And if I go there, is there an ad for the rage to conquer or can I get access?
- [56:38]
Michael Walsh
I believe it's, it's, it's linked somewhere there. The easiest way is to just go on Amazon or go on Macmillan and get it there or a bookstore, of course.
- [56:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, Michael, thank you so much for being with us. And again, good to see you again.
- [56:52]
Michael Walsh
Yes, that's great. We should, we should do this more often.
- [56:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, we will, we will. We'll do it. Especially when your novel, your next two books come out.
- [57:00]
Michael Walsh
Great.
- [57:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you, everybody.
- [57:04]
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