Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - WWII Historian: 3 Decisions That Built The West and How We're Destroying It - James Holland

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

James Holland is one of the greatest WWII historians alive, and his new book should be on the desk of every world leader. We get into the three decisions that built the entire postwar order, and why dismantling them might be the biggest mistake of our lifetime. James Holland, one of WWII’s finest historians, is the co-author of Victory ’45, and author of Cassino ’44, The Savage Storm, Brothers in Arms, Sicily ’43, Normandy ’44, Big Week, The Rise of Germany, and The Allies Strike Back in The War in the West trilogy, Burma ’44, and Dam Busters. He has written and presented the BAFTA shortlisted documentaries Battle of Britain and Dam Busters for the BBC, and his WWII podcast, “We Have Ways of Making You Talk,” now has millions of listeners. He is the founder of the annual Chalke Valley History Festival, and I am proud to attend again this year. I love James Holland, and his new book (OUT TODAY), The Visionaries: Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and the Making of the Post-World War II Order, does not disappoint and is critical at this time. Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://www.scaramucci.net/allthewrongmoves Here is what James Holland had to say about my new book, All The Wrong Moves: "All the Wrong Moves is a profound, compelling, and deeply thought-provoking book. Drawing on the past centuries of America’s rich history, this is a story filled with razor-sharp analysis, wisdom, and pragmatic common sense. Authoritative, incisive, often disturbing, but ultimately offering a path for redemption, it needs to be read by as wide an audience as possible." ―James Holland, author of Normandy '44 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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What America has and which no other country has ever had to the same extent is it has soft power. This is partly through Hollywood, but it also has T-shirts and Nike's and Coca-Cola and chewing gum and McDonald's and everything else. And it's selling modernity and freedom. And if you work hard and if you graft, you can be like Americans and you can live the American dream. That's what they're selling. And that is what America has always sold. And as it has grown post-war, post-1945, not everything has gone 100% according to plan. Why it's so important is American can get rich through the combination of the threat of military dominance,

but with the soft power of selling a dream that is irresistible to a vast number of people who are otherwise going to be oppressed. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. A frequent guest on Open Book, a prolific. author, James Holland. He's back with a new book, The Visionaries, The Making of the Post-World War II order in the West. And I am delighted to have you back on, James, and you've become a personal friend of mine, and I love your writing, and I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to read this in advance, and also comment on it. You've been a great friend to me. But I want to go back to World War II. Well, first of all, let me just say thank you, Anthony. Thank you for that

lovely introduction and thank you for reading it and give me your thoughts and your notes and some pointers on stuff because you know you're an american i'm not i'm writing predominantly about the americans in this book and you know you you don't want to take things for granted as a brit writing about america well you may be more objective as a result of not being american but i the book the book is a fascinating book and what i have said to people this should be a brief this should be in the hands of every presidential candidate this should be in the hands of anybody that's aspiring to think about leadership and the way that we should think about it, which is not even about us, but it's about future generations. What are our decisions going to

do to future generations and how will that sit? You know, all right? I moved Alistair Campbell to Belfast, and he took me to the castle, and he regaled me with stories about the peace in Northern Ireland. And he said something to me, which I'll share with you, which is directly related to this brilliant book, is that good decision making, good political decision making has saved a generation of people in Northern Ireland from violence. And the decision making that was made here, 80 short years ago, 81 short years ago, had really helped create this prosperous moment for the West. It didn't solve everybody's problems because we had the Iron Curtain, the rise of communist China, et cetera. But it really did lay down the structure of what became the post-World War II world, the rules-based society, the Western democracies, and led to, frankly, the success that you've had in your life.

Success, frankly, I've had in my life. But I want to go to World War II because you had me in the back of a half track last June with the chalked history. festival. I mean, I'm climbing into the back of a half track that I think was used by the British or the American military to carry infantry men. And we were cruising around a field in southern England and tell us a little bit about this love affair with the Second World War. What drew you to this period of time? Well, it was, I was, I guess I must have been in my late 20s around that time. And I'd been interested in World War II when I was a boy. And then, you know, I got a teenager and I got into sport and cricket and, you know, hanging out of my mates and

chasing girls and whatever. And I just sort of, it kind of just disappeared from view, really. And I never, although I studied history at school and then at university, I never did any 20th century history at all. And so, so World War II just wasn't really on my radar. And then I went to the 1995-50th anniversary of the end of World War II in London, which was a massive deal. It was like the biggest anniversary since 1945. It was a huge thing. And that kind of sparked something. And then, funny enough, I was playing cricket and near home down in the country.

And this amazing machine appeared over the cricket ground. And I wasn't batting at the time. I looked up and there was this thing sort of balletically pirouetting around the sky. And I turned to the umpire and said, what's that? And he went, that's a spitfire in sort of reverential times. And that was that, Anthony, was my damsel moment. And literally the following weekend was Flying Legends Air Show at Duxford, which had been a Battle of Britain Airfield during the war.

It was later at an American base as well at one point. There's a brilliant American museum to the US Army Air Force as it was in Second World War there now. And that was it. And maybe the Spitfire suckered me in, but what really drew me to it. And I'm sure it's the same for you and for anyone else is the immense human drama of World War. too. This is a truly global conflict, which is fought in the air, on land and sea, in the ice, in the heat, in the desert, in the jungle, in the mountains, along the rivers, in the lowlands, the highlands, everywhere. And it's ordinary people doing the fighting, doing extraordinary things.

These are honest, you know, ordinary people just going about their business and no ever intention of being in the military or wearing a uniform or anything like this, suddenly find themselves. Imagine you're a kind of, you know, a small-time boy from Arkansas, and suddenly you're scrabbling up Montiel Tudso on the Gothic line in the Apennines of Italy and, I don't know, in the late summer of 1944. And you're just thinking, what the hell am I doing here? I mean, it's just incredible. So that's what drew me to it. And it's something, it's a bottomless pit. It's endlessly fascinating.

And the more you get into it, the more you realize there's just so many lessons for us today. And one of the things that I think is really true about the study of history. history is so important, and I know that you know this, is that history doesn't repeat itself, because of course it can't, because that was then and this is now, but patterns of human behavior most certainly do. People respond to similar situations that they get confronted with in pretty much the same way. That's why we still find Shakespeare's plays relevant, you know, because he's talking about human frailties, about love, about hate, about envy, about greed, about kindness, about laughter, about sorrow.

We still feel all those same things in the same way that we did hundreds of centuries ago. And that's why these patterns of human behavior are so important. And that's why when we face troubles in the world today, it's always worth having an analog look at history and looking back, whether it be World War II or even deeper than that, to see how people responded to the kind of similar scenarios in which they found themselves today in the past. Thank you for tuning in an open book.

haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. You know, I grew up in a family who had two World War II veterans. You and I have talked about this. My uncle Anthony was on Normandy Beach. And you wrote a beautiful book about Normandy, Normandy, 44. And that's why you're called Anthony, isn't it? That's why I'm called Anthony. You know, named after him. He survived the war, actually. He was actually, he survived the beach.

He got up the hill. He made it for about four days. And then he was wounded in a small town on the way to Paris. He was in an Army Field Hospital for about three weeks. He had the opportunity to get discharged, James. But that was that generation. He said no. He went back into battle.

He fought in the Ardennes. And then he ended up in July of 1945 at Potsdam. with Harry Truman, and which is why Harry Truman, for all of us, was an extremely fascinating figure when we were growing up as kids. He would talk about Patton and Truman, and he would talk about these American leaders, and he talked about them with reverence. You know, he also talked about the Army with some disdain, too. He was a very honest guy about the bureaucracy of the Army, and lots of his friends in his mind died unnecessarily due to decision-making and things like that. So we know nothing's perfect. We're not suggesting that.

But there was a time in American history where there was a group of people that were generally trying to do the right thing. Roosevelt was planning for the peace prior to his departure. He died in April of 1945, but he was laying down the architecture of peace and he hired this guy. Harry Truman had no college education. From the Midwest. From the Midwest. Okay. There was a guy named Pendergast.

a little bit of a corrupt political figure in the state of Missouri that he was tied to. He was a failed haberdasher, very famously. We all know that about him. He had to wear glasses in the infantry in World War II. Imagine that today, right? He's in the American infantry wearing glasses. But here he is. He's thrust into the top job.

He's in pottsdam. He's learning about the bomb. He didn't know about the bomb before he took the job. You only met Roosevelt twice since the inauguration. Only met Roosevelt twice. There's a great scene in the Truman book by David McCullough, where he doesn't want the job. He's in Chicago. He overhears the baritone voice of FDR, where he's barking into the phone that this

SOB better take the job, at which point he says, I'll take the job. His wife was actually mad at him for doing it. But he's got the job. And he's got these great men around him. So set the scene for us. The war is coming to an end. Roosevelt puts out a blueprint and tell us about Harry Truman and tell us about the thought process to make these great institutions that you write about Brett and Woods, treaty there, the Marshall Plan, and where America is thinking about its role in the world. Well, he, I mean, just imagine him on the evening.

It's about a little bit after 7 o'clock on the 12th of April, 1945. He gets the news, get to the White House, ASAP. He gets in there, goes in the bank door, comes in and says, you know, what's going on? And they say, you know, the president is dead. You're now the president. And he leans over to, he goes towards Eleanor Roosevelt, the president's widow, and says to her, you know, what can I do to help? And she says, no, how can I help you? You're the one in trouble now.

and this is the most reluctant president probably we've ever had, or you've ever had, I should say. And he does what he does out of a profound sense of Christian and moral duty. He's not doing this for the plaudits. He's doing it because he has been asked to do it. This is a task. This is a moment of national crisis. He's been asked to step up. He does.

And he makes this incredible speech the following Monday to Congress. And everyone's thinking, who is this guy? You know, he's a complete no-hoper. He's completely unsuited to this. He's a kind of backwards guy from the Midwest. You know, what does he know? He hasn't got a college education or the rest of it. He stands up and delivers this tour de force, which is full of moral courage, moral strength,

profound Christian values. And he says, I'm going to continue the work. I need your help. But America has this global role now. We have to step up. I'm going to step up. I'm going to do everything I possibly. can with your help to kind of, you know, steer the ship in the right direction.

He says all the right things and it's a real marker. And then he has this incredible learning curve between then, April, middle of April and the end of the war on, which is announced on the 8th of May, his 60th birthday, incidentally. And one of the things that always struck me about Truman is when you see the film footage of that press conference where he's announcing VE Day, it's really muted. And he's going, you know, the job's not done yet. And boy, it isn't because, you know, this is the middle of the Okinawa campaign, one of the most brutal bloody battles in the Pacific War going on at that time.

And he also knows by this point that there's an atomic bomb in the offing, which may or may not work, but he had no idea of this, as he pointed out, before he became president. And he's also realizing that the Soviet Union and Stalin are not to be, are not coming over onto the Allied side. You know, they might be for the duration of the war, but problems are clearly appearing. And the USSR is going to be the next enemy.

How do you navigate through these waters? Then there's going to be the kind of the post-Europe peace conference at Potsdam in July. And just as that's happening is the test of the atomic bomb. And it works, which suddenly means he's got his other weight on his shoulders, which is if they're going to drop it, it's going to be his call. I mean, just imagine, you know, a few weeks, a few months ago. So you'd just be in this kind of, you know, minding your P's and Q's as a kind of domestic vice president. And suddenly you've got all this incredible responsibility on his shoulders.

And boy, is there ever a man who steps up and deals with it and takes it on the chin. But the power doesn't corrupt him. He's not trying to get rich on this. He is just trying to do the very best job he can. Now, he makes, that's not mean to say he doesn't make some mistakes. he does. But as a kind of, as a kind of example of how seriously to take this job, this greatest job of all as president of the leading nation in the free world, he is an astonishing example and deserves far greater recognition, I think, as a man, as a politician, and for his achievements,

which are still to come, for the most part, at that point in July 1945. I think he, I think he's absolutely amazing guy. I mean, my admiration for FDR is limitless, but my admiration for Truman is of a different caliber because he does what he does. You know, Roosevelt is patrician, he's East Coast, he's privileged, he's kind of sort of born to it in a certain way. Truman's achievements achievements have to be judged against the limitations of his background, his upbringing, and who he is and he steps up and I think it's just remarkable. I think the thing that's the most fascinating about him is the reputation that he has prior to the job as president and then tell us about the reputation he's garnering six months into the presidency as he's making these decisions. And of course,

he's making a decision about the deployment of the atomic bomb. He's making a decision about the ideas around the Marshall Plan and how. they're going to implement the Bretton Woods Treaty. So take us through some of that decision-making and take us through the revolution or the evolution of his reputation as this is going on. Well, he navigates the end of the war, first in Europe in May, 1945, and then against Japan in August, brilliantly, I think. You know, he threatens the atomic bomb. He gives plenty of it. He doesn't actually spell out what it is, but he says to the Japanese, you know, we have got this absolutely terrible weapon.

It's coming away if you don't play ball. They don't. The decision to do it, you know, everyone knows that the moment you drop an atomic bomb, a Rubicon has been crossed. The world will never be the same again because you're going from a traditional martial era to the atomic era and the nuclear era. And everything has changed as a result of that. And he knows he's going to responsible that. And he also knows that he is going to be responsible directly for the deaths of untold thousands of Japanese civilians, as well as military types,

and that is a burden he has to hold. And someone says, you know, later on, says to him, Mr. President, you know, how did you justify that? And he said, I knew when I had a weapon that could end the war, I couldn't look into the eyes of a widow or the mother of a killed American serviceman in Japan knowing that I had the means of saving his life and I didn't use it. It is the perfect answer to which there is no further response.

I mean, you can argue whether it's the right one, but it's a reason and it's a valid reason. And he has the moral courage to go through with it and do it and it works and it brings about the end of the war. So that's a massive tick. Then you've got the whole potential problems of the fact that American industry is geared up as a massive war machine, is the arsenal of democracy, etc. And everyone's been planning with their orders for war going on into 1946. And suddenly it isn't. So, you know, because the invasion of Japan is being planned for November of 1945 before the atomic bomb gets dropped. So suddenly you've got the threat of loss of orders and potential recession, but it doesn't happen.

The transition back to consumer manufacturer is pretty smooth. But there is then the fallout. And there is the kind of fallout in 1946 as everyone's coming back. You know, there is the reduction of the size of the armed forces. there is loss of servicemen coming back, there is a certain amount of unemployment again, there is all that transition from wartime to peacetime. He loses the midterms in 1946. And he looks like a lame duck and everyone's thinking, oh, well, Truman's finished. Not a bit of it. This liberates him. It liberates him because then he just says, right, okay, I'm a one-term president.

This is my chance. I'm just going to do things because they're the right things to do. And by the spring of 1947, Britain is completely broke. It's, you know, it's been in the war since the 3rd of September 1939. It spent all its cash, most of it in America, it has to be said. And it can't bail out these nations which are hovering between turning behind communism and staying behind the iron curtain or those who want to see democracy and freedom. and America is starting to see itself as the beacon of that new progressive democracy, which has been outlined by Roosevelt, and which Truman completely adheres to, completely buys into, and wants to see that continuation of America's role, expansion of Americans' role.

Oh, and by the way, let America get wealthy and rich on the back of it, but there's nothing wrong with that. That's absolutely fine. but be this kind of beacon of the champion of sound economics, progressive democracy, freedom of speech, freedom from fear, freedom from one, freedom of religion, the land of free, the land of hope, the American dream, and spreading that message around the free world. And Greece is going to collapse in the spring of 1947. and it looks like it's all going to be over and the communists are going to rule and it's going to fall in behind the iron curtains. Same two with Turkey. And Britain appeals to Americans says,

we can't bail them out. We literally, the coffers are there. We don't have anything left. The only people that can help is Americans. And Truman thinks that is what we need to do. It's going to cost us now, but the benefits are going to be great because that means you're going to have aggressive democracy elsewhere in Greece and Turkey and so on. And that means that that they're going to be successful because a free democratic, economically sound country is going to be more prosperous than one that is run by an autocracy of communism behind the iron curtain where people are not free, where they're oppressed. They are going to be an economic decline. We are going to be an economic uptick, you know, rise. And so therefore, in the long term,

we'll be able to trade with them and partner with them. And so in the long term, whatever we spend on these countries that need our desperately need our help. They are going to, that is going to come back and we're going to get richer as a result. But that requires a lot of vision and a lot of salesmanship to sell and get that across the line with, not only with Congress, but with the American people, who, after all, are answerable to the American people. And he makes this astoundingly good speech at the beginning of March, 1947, where he stands up. Don't forget, he's a lame duck president in name. And he stands up and does the speech and says, you know, there are two types of world.

There is the world where the majority are governed by the minority in oppression without freedoms. And then there is the other view, which is where the majority get to choose the minority that govern them and are completely free. And that is the world we need to champion. And we need to step up here and be the world's banker, but savior and have this big. bigger role and everyone cheers and gets a standing ovation, all the rest of it, and it goes through Congress and it happens. And out of the, this is the Truman Doctrine. And out of this comes the Marshall Plan, because suddenly they're thinking, well, hang on a minute, you know, West Germany is on

its knees. East Germany is now falling behind the iron curtain. We can showcase the benefits of being free and liberal and a manufacturing country, an industrial country where people have the choices to make their own decisions, et cetera, et cetera, we'll bail out Japan, we'll bail out Italy, our former enemies. We'll bail out West Germany, our former enemy. We will be the first country ever where the victor is financially

bailing out and helping the vanquish. This has never happened before. And this is completely progressive and amazing and innovative. We completely take it for granted now. He's got a brilliant new secretary of state who has been the chief of staff of the armed forces in the US and the

World War II. This is General George C. Marshall who is kind of politically new everyone likes him. So he says, right, you can have the, it can be called the Marshall Plan, because you're the Secretary of State and everyone will buy this. They won't want the Truman plan. And someone says to him, but Mr. President, you know, it's your idea, it's your name. You should, it should be the Truman Plan. And he goes, I'm not doing this for credit. I'm doing it because it's the right thing to do. Now, whether you're a Trump fan or not, or whether you think he's the spawn of Satan, you can't ever imagine, President. You can't ever imagine,

Donald J. Trump saying that, can you? No, I mean, this is the, I guess, the central point of your book, which I love, which is why I want to get it in the hands of everybody, a nation that is prosperous and powerful, and arguably has the best military industrial complex in the world. And again, I'm talking about America in 1945, but also America today, James. And I want you to think about it for a second. what is the best diplomatic approach? What makes the most sense? And you can take it right back to middle school.

Is it the benevolent superpower that's trying to help others? Or does a caustic bully do better than a benevolent superpower? The benevolent superpower is going to win every single time. And history has told you that. This is and but I want you to give us a few more sentences as to why. Okay. Why is this such a. brilliant strategy, because America, when you have a superpower like this, you can go to Rome,

Spain, even times in British imperialism. It's very hard for the superpower to have allies, but this strategy allows America to have an endless number of allies. So explain to us the counterintuition of why this works. It works because what you're doing is you're selling a dream, you're selling a golden land. You're saying, America's got the military threat. We've got atomic bombs. We've got, we've got, we've got a huge air force, we've got a huge army, we've got absolutely everything. We can hammer you. And boy, by the way, we just have. Okay. And by the way, Soviet Union, you know,

an inconvenient, true for you in your kind of great patriotic war myth, but you only did that encirclement at Stalingrad, your great, greatest victory, which turned the tide of the thanks to 70,000 American trucks that we shipped over you for nothing. So we can do military. But as everyone knows, military browbeats people, it caltows people,

but it doesn't sell a dream. It sells quite the opposite. And what America has, and which no other country has ever had to the same extent, is it has soft power. And this is partly through Hollywood, because it was the birthplace of the movies,

which are an international export and can be seen globally. But it also has T-shirts and Nikes and Coca-Cola and chewing gum and McDonald's and everything else. And it has a lot of most of those things, not McDonald's and Nikes at that time, but it has a lot of these features in World War II and in the 1930s. And it's selling modernity and freedom. And if you work hard and if you graft, you can come over to it. You can be like Americans and you can live the American dream and you can have a big Cadillac and you can go to the movie house three times a week and you can you can drink soda and

you can eat popcorn and have a have a picket face out of the front of the and a porch with a swing seed on and you can have beautiful little moppets that go to school and get educated and are happy and free and don't have to worry about a dime you know and that's what they're selling and that is what America has always sold and as it has grown post war post-1945 it okay so Not everything has gone 100% according to plan, but I, I mean, talk to the South Koreans and the North Koreans and see who's having the better life. So, you know, I would say that the intervention in Korea was pretty successful and pretty good. And Vietnam, I mean, you know, no one quite knew how communism was going to kind of shape up at this point. But, but, you know, communism is for the oppressed.

It's not for the free. And why it's so important is American can get rich through the combination of the thrift. threat of military dominance, but with the soft power of selling a dream that is irresistible to a vast number of people who are otherwise going to be oppressed. If you just go around hammering people with bombs and wrecking their lives and wrecking the infrastructure around them, what do you think those people are going to be, those people in Iran, for example, who are against the regime, who, okay, so just take you, you're an Iranian in December. You're You've been out on the streets.

You're out on the streets in January. You want to end the role of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Islamic Revolution Regal Corps. You want to kind of stop refreshing. You want to have freedom. And the Americans are kind of encouraging. And you're thinking, great, this is good. The Americans are coming with their huge military.

They're going to knock these guys out. It's going to be great. The threat of it. They are the kind of, you know, the strongest nation in the world. And once we've overcome this terrible regime, We can be free like them and we can want to the streets and do whatever we want and eat McDonald's and so on and so forth from wear t-shirts and nikes. Then America comes in and doesn't do that, doesn't follow up, doesn't send any support whatsoever, changes its mind every two minutes, then suddenly comes in and is blitzing the place to hell, changing his mind every two seconds, all around it you just see destruction? That person who was completely pro the US, do you think in 20 years time when he's grown up and he realized that his parents were killed by an American bomb?

Do you think he's going to be well disposed to the U.S.? I mean, no. But he's also got the history of the U.S. formalizing coup in 1973. And it goes back to 1953. And their involvement with the British trying to kind of, you know, denationalize BP and all the, you know, Iranian oil and all the rest of it. So what is just so completely horrendous about the current administration

and their lack of planning is Venezuela is not Iranians. Iran is not Venezuela and it is it is imbecilic to kind of think that what works in one place works another and I would I would also argue that that that approach is kind of incredibly 19th century anyway I mean you know when Roosevelt comes in in 1933 in his inauguration speech he says you know we're not going to go around bullying our neighbors anymore we're not going to go around and sort of telling people who can be head of state in Mexico or or Panama or wherever or Nicaragua or or South America. We're actually just going to help these guys and we're going to bail them out financially. They're going to get more prosperous. Then they're going to want to do more trade with us,

which is going to make us richer. It's going to make them more stable. And the whole of the America's north and south and central is going to be more peaceful. What's not to like with that policy? And since the current administration's coming, we've bullied, we've cajoled, we've threatened, we're going to take over Cuba, we're going to launch a coup in Venezuela. You know, that might have been successful on one level, but it's, but it's, it's bullying, it's against international law, and America has been the great bulk of international law and order and selling a dream, selling a vision of progression and democracy and freedom. The moment you start kind of bullying people around and hammering them, that goes out the window. And you cancel your aid budget in Africa and

all the rest of it. It's a tragedy. And the whole point of the book is really to show that when you have, what happens in democracies is that when you have economic mayhem and economic instability, you then have political instability too. Because the ordinary working people and the middle classes who are the first people to lose out when there's a major economic crisis, whether it's a calamitous crash, like the Wall Street crash of 1929, or whether it's the kind of the debt that's built up as a result of the Iraq and Afghan wars, followed by the 2008 crash,

or the kind of loss of contracts to the Chinese because of the WTO in 1999, whatever it is. But when you have that, they're the people that lose the most always. I mean, the rich are fine, because if you've got $5 billion and you lose a billion, you're still got $4 billion, and you know, you're doing okay. So it's those that lose out.

And then they kind of think, well, the current system isn't working. So this is when a wrecking ball comes in. The problem is, is wrecking balls always, always, always make you even poorer. I mean, always, because autocrats and people who want to do things different, that might sound attractive because the current situation isn't working. But if the wrecking ball approach had worked, the ordinary conservative types of already have tried it. So it just doesn't, doesn't work. So it's going to make them poorer. And, and, You know, you have to learn history and realize that there is a way of responding to financial crises, which is Keynesian, if you go down that route. but there are means of riding that storm,

which after all is one of the reasons for the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 at the height of the Normandy campaign, at the height of Operation Begratian, the Soviet Red Army campaign in the summer, at the time of major battles going on in the Pacific. There was an economic conference to plan what legislation can be put in place internationally in the democratic world that will ensure that you don't have these huge,

huge swings and peaks and troughs that you had as a result of the Wall Street crash and the smooth Hawley tariff out of that followed in May 1930 to try and prevent that. And out of that comes, of course, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which is that a stabilise failing economies and all the rest of it's an inherently really, really good idea. And they're still in place to this day. So these people are, you know, people like Roosevelt and the people around him and having an excellent team of amazingly competent, capable.

people around them and also Truman and he does exactly the same ensures that you can start to really plan ahead and think ahead and come up with sound sensible ideas

but framed within an ideology that is inherently attractive and that's where the kind of you know the Rooseveltian Four Freedoms for example come in I mean what's not to like about the Four Freedom I mean, it's a great mantra, isn't it? So it's having the hard-nosed pragmatism with the vision about how you're going to implement

that with an attractive kind of proposition which makes people feel warm and gooey inside and gives them hope. Where's the hope at the moment? Well, that's the reason why I want to get this book out there and get it to as many people as possible. So you are familiar with our four. So we have five words we've picked from your book or phrases. And I'm going to say the word and then I want you to give me your reaction to be a sentence or two. Okay, you ready?

Yep. So if I say the Marshall Plan, you say what? Truman. World War I. Feral opportunities. Okay. World War II. World War II.

Amazing coalition. The apogee of coalition warfare from the point of view of the Western allies of following a single purpose with coordination, cooperation, and coalition. Yeah, which is the exact opposite of what the Americans are doing right now, by the way. This book is a reverse mirror. Here's how the Americans operated when we were at our best. So, right, let's keep going. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Genius.

Arias Truman. The best man ever to hold that post. Yeah. Why do you say that, by the way, because I believe that, by the way. I just think he's, I think he was pure of heart. I just think he was such a good man. I'm attracted to people that aren't necessarily the most brilliant, but, but, but people whose moral compass is just flawless. And I think he, I think his is. I, I, I, I, you know, Roosevelt is Machiavellian. He's ruthless. He can be a real son of a gun. He's brilliant, and I think his heart is absolutely, you know, I think, I think Roosevelt was a fundamentally good man despite this rifflessness.

I think Truman is just, oh my God, his modesty, his strength of character, his strength of morality, his moral courage, his moral compass. It's just perfect. He's the right man in the right job. I like reminding people that the White House was under Trump. tremendous disrepair. Roosevelt lived there for 13 years, and they went to him and said, we got to repair the thing. And he said, not on my watch. I'm enjoying living here. I'm not on my watch. Harry Truman gets the job. They say the same thing to him. He moves at the Blair House for

three years. See, people forget this about this man, the selfless nature of him. And I would just encourage everybody listening in. If you get a moment, there are recordings of Truman. You can go to the Truman Library, where he's done a whole series of interviews. And these interviews are absolutely fascinating because it was a preparation for his memoirs. And just talks about the people he met, and it's so plain spoken. And there's hours of them. And I've regaled myself and most of them. But one of the things I also would encourage people to listen to are his conversations with John Kennedy, which are recorded. He hates Kennedy, but Kennedy is trying to charm him, and he's calling him on his birthday and wishing him a happy birthday, or someone's passed away. He calls him to tell

him, or I got to go to Sam Rayburn's funeral. He calls him to invite him, take him on the plane and so on and so forth. And just to hear Truman's voice and the way he handled himself, where he was once the most powerful man in the world in this reluctant position is something as in America, I'm very proud of. I'm very proud to say that Harry Truman was once our president. And I think you have beautifully rendered him and so many other great figures in this book, James. So I want to... Oh, well, thank you. ...for the book. It's the visionaries, Breton Woods, the Marshall Plan and the making of the post-World War II order. And the legendary James Holland, thank you so much for joining

us today on Open Book. Oh, thank you, Anthony. Thank you having me on. It's been a pleasure. Hey, y'all's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder What If? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust.

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