The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Do Biden and Zelensky Even Like Each Other?

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

A new book on Joe Biden has Brian Stewart talking about the relationship the US President has with the Ukrainian President. It may surprise you.  But first, we bring back Dr Lisa Barrett from Halifax to answer some of your questions about the apparent resurgence of COVID. 

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. A twofer today. Tuesdays means Brian Stewart and he will be here on Ukraine, but also because you've asked for it, the latest on the COVID news with Dr. Lisa Barrett. That's all coming up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Welcome to Tuesday. Welcome to another, what we hope will be informative edition, informative episode of The Bridge. It's Tuesday, of course, and that means Brian Stewart, and he will be here in a few

minutes time to give us the latest on Ukraine and an interesting angle. The take is, how do Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky really get along? Do they even like each other? There's some new information on that. But we'll start in a moment with the latest on the COVID news. But first of all, I've got to say something about this airplane business. You know I love airplane stories. But, you know, Canada every once in a while makes the headlines for all the wrong reasons. And there have been a few snide remarks in different parts of the world

about how we can't even get our prime ministerial jet organized to bring the prime minister back to Canada from the G20 summit in India. And it's true. The plane went unserviceable on the ground in India. And it meant, if you can believe it, that we had to fly a whole other plane over from Canada to India with basically one person on board, a technician. So either the technician was going to fix the initial plane

or the prime minister and the entourage and the media so either the technician was going to fix the initial plane, or the prime minister and the entourage and the media and everybody else would pile onto the second plane and come back home. Well, as it turned out, the technician obviously knows what he or she is doing because they fixed the plane. And as we speak now, they're flying back to Canada. Long flight. I've taken,

I did Toronto, New Delhi once, non-stop, 14 hours, straight up over the North Pole and down. I don't know which route this one's taking,

but you can rest assured it's probably still in the air right now as we speak. Interestingly enough, there was also an airplane story, and I love airplane stories. There was an airplane story involving Pierre Polyev after the conservative convention in Quebec City. He gets on a plane, a WestJet flight from Quebec City going to Calgary. And what does he do? He goes up and he takes the microphone and he gives a little spiel on the plane. Now, there was mostly Conservative Party delegates on that plane. It wasn't a charter, but there was mostly Conservative Party delegates heading home after the convention.

So there had been, you know, some people loved it, others thought, is this really the way you should use the public service of an aircraft to give a political speech. I don't know. It reminded me, come on, be honest. When you fly, have you ever thought, man, I'd like to get up there and make a little speech, tell a few jokes, but they let me take over the microphone?

Probably not. But I can recall, there's actually a couple of different times during my long ago career as a newscaster. I can remember a couple of times where Air Canada personnel on board, the flight attendants or even the pilot at one time, said, come on, Peter, why don't you go up there and do the news? Stand at the front of the plane, hold the microphone and do the news.

They were kidding. And it never happened. But I wouldn't be honest if I sat here and said, I never thought about it. I'd love to have done that. All right. Those are my two airplane stories for today. Let's get to the important stuff.

And the important stuff today begins with Dr. Lisa Barrett. And those of you who listened to the bridge through the worst of COVID will know Dr. Barrett and Dr. Bogoch and others who were part of our kind of unofficial team that kept us informed every week about what the situation was on the COVID story. Well, there have been, you know, there have been, well, I'll explain it as we get in to the conversation with Dr. Barrett. But clearly some of you wanted to hear what's really going on this year, what's going on right now? And what should we know? So here's my conversation with Dr. Lisa Barrett. So you're back by popular demand because ever since I signed on after the summer, I keep getting emails from people saying, tell us about COVID.

What are we supposed to believe right now? How worried should we be? So how worried should we be? Because you hear all these things and you see Anthony Fauci popping up on every network in the United States talking about, you know, he's being very cautious and being calm. But he's there. And as soon as you see him, you think, oh, my gosh, something's happening. So should we be worried? Yep.

We've got a lot of respiratory viruses coming um and um pick your favorite way of saying this but when there's a lot of respiratory viruses around and canadians all start to head inside to do their thing because it's getting colder we're going to see a lot of disease and covid has not become seasonal yet and we're you know it didn't really go away entirely over the summer. And now it's about to go up quite quickly. So yeah, I'm not looking forward to the next few months, either personally or professionally. Not a panic situation.

Lots of things to help us manage it now that we have tools. But yeah, it started earlier, I think, than we all thought it might in terms of going back up. So how is it going to change our life? Well, I'm hoping not too much. You know, we came from the pre-COVID time when respiratory viruses, other than flu or influenza, people were like, man, you get the flu, you get a cold. It's what we all do. We all walk around as, you know,

drippy humans for a good chunk of the year in the fall, winter. And people are a little too prematurely putting COVID into that bucket of you don't end up dead or in hospital in an ICU and therefore it must be okay. And so how's it going to change our lives? I think we need to keep COVID separate still when we're thinking about respiratory viruses and consider being a little more cautious on the respiratory health front as we go into the fall. What does that mean? It means it does mean for folks, especially those high risk, get a fall dose of vaccine. And it means, you know, if you're going to be out and about, there's nothing wrong.

It's okay to care about COVID and wear a mask in crowded indoor spaces you're going to be in for a long time and use easy tools like tests to help support you in your decision making. What's this RSV thing that they talk about that we may end up getting a vaccine for that as well? Hopefully we do get a vaccine for that. So respiratory syncytial virus, we've chosen yet another easy to wrap your tongue around set of words. RSV, traditionally, we've always thought of 10 years ago as a baby virus.

So it's a respiratory virus, it's spread through the air, just like COVID is. And it can spread about the same amount of distance. But it generally doesn't cause a lot of very serious lung disease, except in babies, particularly premature babies whose lungs weren't totally developed. Over the last seven, eight years, RSV or respiratory syncytial virus has become an emerging virus also in older people. So whatever is shifting and drifting with RSV, it's now what we call an emerging infection in older adults as well. So it's also coming up. It's coming up. The absolute number of cases compared to a couple of years ago when we all masked are going to be quite a bit higher. And there's a group of small children and older adults that haven't been exposed as much in the last couple of years. And that's why we're all very worried that there'll be a big upbound of people who are vulnerable getting bad RSV infection. And though we hope a vaccine's coming, not here quite yet. How bad does it get if you get

RSV? Yeah, most of us probably wouldn't really know we've got it other than be annoyingly tired and maybe a bit of a drippy nose, some sore eyes. But babies, the premature babies can be sick enough to go into an intensive care unit. And we do have a couple of therapies that can be kind of tossed out as last-ditch efforts, or there's one particular medication in Canada that can be used to help prevent babies from getting RSV, but it can lead to ICU admissions. And in older adults who end up going to hospital with RSV, a certain number of those people will end up in ICU or not making it through. It's becoming an important thing. Again, if we toss all that in with all the other far more benign, not really all that severe viruses, if we toss all influenza, RSV and COVID into that bucket and

make people feel bad about caring about respiratory virus season and being a bit cautious, we're going to see some longer term side effects and some deaths that we don't really need to see. So fall, be aware, think about it. Don't have to stay home and sit by yourself all fall. But it's OK to think of these three viruses as different than your common cold. OK, let me let me talk about vaccines for a minute in general, because in spite of the fact that thousands, tens of thousands of people's lives may have been saved with the COVID vaccines. Vaccines in some quarters have got a bad name these last couple of years. Now we're talking about this fall, the potential for a new COVID booster, an RSV vaccine, and the normal flu vaccine. Now, is it reasonable to think that especially those in the vulnerable groups

would get all three of these? Yeah, if you have all three available, I would say it's pretty reasonable. The most common thing friends and family ask me is, am I not just going to exhaust my immune system? Is there really any benefit to boosting my immune system up against three different things? So far, at least from other vaccines for other diseases, there's not been seen a point where giving too many vaccines at once reduces the amount of effectiveness for the most part. So you can get all of those and get them and expect that they're going to do you some good if you're in those vulnerable groups. So I wouldn't worry about wearing out your immune

system too much in the short run with these three. Take the opportunity to add that vaccine tool to your toolbox. I think we'd be silly not to comment on things that happen. A family member asked me recently, you know, I know of someone who got this vaccine as a young 40-year-old and this person died. I'm sure it was related to the vaccine. Lots of studies out there, of course, that say the vaccines are far safer than getting COVID. But if you give millions and millions and millions of people something, there are going to be a couple of people. And literally, it's in the 10s and 20s and 30s that we see out of billions of people and doses that have a bad side effect. It's going to happen at some point. So I don't tell people that there is

absolutely zero risk, but I do tell them that vaccines for both COVID flu, and we think RSV is going to be the same, your ability to have a better outcome, not just not dead, but lower risk for heart disease in the first year after you have your infection, lower risk for diabetes, lower risk for high blood pressure. It looks like the vaccines and limiting your infection and inflammation will also help reduce some of those side effects. That research to get numbers around it, still going on, but you've got a lot of really good things happening after you get a vaccine. So I think, think very long. If you're a vulnerable person about this, get the vaccines is my take home message for those people. And if you have

other questions, do ask somebody smart and not your favorite social media platform. That can definitely get you into trouble. Here's the other question or the other kind of statement you hear a lot on the part of those who believe in vaccines and have had their vaccines. On the COVID front, they've had the main vaccine, they've had the boosters, and they may have had COVID. You know, set them back for four or five days, but that's it. It was kind of a mild case, as they say.

Yeah. And the belief is that if you've been through all that, your immune system has built up so much that you don't need anymore. And the answer to that is what the answer to that is that your immune system relies on markers it identifies the virus through pattern recognition of how the virus looks and covid and flu um change quite a bit from year to year And COVID is still outpacing the amount of change compared to even influenza virus. And so your immune system has been educated well for everything it's seen through vaccines and infections. And that's amazing. And it does a good job of keeping a good chunk of that memory, but not every single bit of it is going to be

useful anymore because the virus has shifted away. It's got to work around for your immune system and it looks less visible. The new vaccines that come out in the fall for COVID and hopefully for flu, we're never ever quite sure, but it's looking like it's going to be a good match. They help to put out the latest identifiers for those virus into your immune system so that your body can see the latest version best. If you do not get updated vaccines, you've got old information out there. The virus knows that and can slip away and cause a worse infection. So the whole idea of a fall booster is to make the viruses most visible to your educated immune system. It's to update the education. It's kind of like being able to get

the news. You don't just listen to the news once and assume you know everything. You listen to the news all the time to get the most up-to-date information. Vaccines are the most up-to-date information for your immune system for fall. What's the buzz amongst professionals like yourself in the infectious disease? I was going to say business, but that doesn't sound right. But you know what I mean. What are you men and women talking about this fall? What's the buzz? So right now, we're all still a little crispy, I think. I'm pretty worried that we're going to see

enough of an upswing in the population level amount of COVID along with flu and RSV in younger kids and older adults, that even a very well-protected population without any checks and balances is going to see a lot of hospitalizations coming in, a lot of vulnerable folks getting sick. I would say most people are kind of concerned about that from a health system perspective. We're still just barely able to bring back enough doctors and nurses, particularly in rural areas, and that's everywhere in the country, to keep emergencies open. So I think we're all talking about that a lot, trying to think of ways and approaches

that help people understand that you can truly care about this and not have to turn it into the pandemic catastrophe that we all still kind of have a reaction to. So trying to find ways of getting that message out to the public. It's okay to be cautious without staying home and doing nothing and making sure that people know, you know, there should not be a stigma to thinking about this still as you go about your life. So that's a lot of the talk. Hospitalizations, do we have enough space and time to look after people? And then the second part is how do we get this modulated message out to people that it's not all or nothing? Think of this as just, you know, it's okay to care. It's

okay to care about your own health and that of others, shared air. So a lot of that going around at the moment. And not every infectious disease doctor thinks of this the same, you know, some people are pretty convinced, let's stop talking about it altogether. Plunk it into the bucket with all the other respiratory viruses, and it'll sort itself out over the next three to five years. Some people are kind of closer to my bucket of keep talking about it a little bit until we know a bit more and make sure people feel okay with thinking about it more and still doing tests if they think it's going to help them with their decision making. So lots of different things. And for

people out there, that can also be a bit confusing, right? I tell people if experts don't always perfectly agree, that means that we're doing the right job and we're thinking about individual people and patients and not just populations. And so individual people and patients need different approaches to each person. So it's okay to hear different messages and make sure you ask good questions. And, and it's really a choose your own adventure out there right now. Um, just, uh, I think it's good for people to push for a little more information. Okay, last question.

You've used this word a number of times in our talk, and that's the word vulnerable for vulnerable people. What's your latest definition of vulnerable? Is it just the elderly? Is it just those with underlying conditions? Is that who we're talking about? Definitely older folks, definitely people who have poor immune systems, either because they were born that way. Most of those folks will know a doctor that they have their own immunologist that looks after them. But patients undergoing many cancer therapies, blood cancer

therapies in particular, who have bad arthritis, who have MS, who are on immune suppressing medications every single day or month or week, those people are at risk for getting some bad disease, some of those folks. And then of course, very young people who are vulnerable because they're either premature babies or they're just very new to this world and don't have a great immune system yet. Those are the folks that are the most vulnerable. And most of that is age, but some of that for people with poor immune systems out there. I think we've talked about it briefly before. There are some people that are actually at risk for getting not long COVID, but persistent COVID, where they are

symptomatic, have symptoms and active virus for weeks. And the therapies we have are very, very slow to cure them unless we treat them very specially. So if there are people out there, just purely as a public service, I think folks should recognize if they're in one of those vulnerable groups and they do get COVID, make sure you reach out to one of your specialists if you have one and make sure that they get you on to the right therapy early. Make sure you test and you can't know you've got COVID or get treatment and you can't know you've got influenza and need treatment unless you test. So I think we're going to have to let people feel okay to test again when there's therapeutics available. Dr. Barrett, as always, we thank you for your time. I love talking to you, but I hope we don't have to talk for a while anyway.

I'd love to not chat with you again. Exactly. Okay, you take care, and I'm sure we will talk again at some point. Cheers. Dr. Lisa Barrett from Halifax. Always good to talk to Lisa Barrett, as I said, and we appreciate her time. Okay, we're going to take a quick break,

and when we come back, it will be time for our friend Brian Stewart. And a particularly interesting angle today on a new book that's come out. It's actually a book about Joe Biden. But there's an interesting segment there on Ukraine. And we're going to talk about that with Brian Stewart right after this. And welcome back. It's Peter Mansbridge here with The Bridge. You're listening to The Bridge on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks,

or on your favorite podcast platform. Tuesdays for the last, well, it's getting close to two years now, a year and a half anyway, have been dominated by the Ukraine story. And as our guide on this, we've had Brian Stewart, the great foreign correspondent, great war correspondent, somebody who studies these kind of conflicts all the time and has great insight on the story. And today's insight is particularly interesting. So let's waste no more time and get to it with Brian Stewart. All right, Brian,

there haven't been a lot of books out yet on the war in Ukraine. There is one that's just come out that is receiving some attention, not a lot. It's kind of under the radar in the general media. But there's a lot of intriguing parts to

this book. And you've latched on to some of them already. So first, tell us about the book. And then we'll go into what some of the elements are in it. Yes, indeed, the book, which is not primarily about Ukraine, but certainly touches on it in an interesting way, is just not getting a lot of media attention, but it's called The Last President, about Joe Biden, by a writer called Franklin Foer, who not only is a top writer for The Atlantic, but he's also quite an expert in Ukraine. Anyways, he spent the longest time ever, it's a unique book in so much as he got access into the notoriously tight Biden White House. I mean, that White House does not leak. Biden relies on very few people in the circle, family and staffers, and they're very hard to penetrate. This writer did. And he has an amazing insight

into Biden, the man, and Biden's thinking. And one of the things he points out that really got my attention in a hurry is that Biden for a long time hasn't been able to stand Zelensky of Ukraine. He found him, quote, a pain in the ass for much of their discussions. And then, you know, that really stops you in the middle of a war when you're hearing about two leaders who aren't getting on. But basically, this seems to be the right stuff. This seems to be a valid explanation of how rocky their relationship has actually been. He writes that even before the war broke out in 2022, in the fall of 2021, when Biden and Zelensky first met, Biden found Zelensky a terrible pain

because he wanted to preach to him. He wanted to tell him how much America had to do and how NATO should be reshaped and Ukraine needed to be in NATO. And he wanted the United States to get it in NATO and on and on and on. And Biden, one thing Biden does not like and cannot stand is being lectured to. He may look like the old school Irish politician who just likes to chat away. Actually, he's in many ways a rather cold realist. He sees foreign policy in realistic terms. He doesn't like people to get emotional about it. Because after all, he was a generation of the Cold War. It remembers the risk of nuclear

weapons being tossed around. And Zelensky came to him both before the war and soon after it broke out, urgently demanding the most really deadly American conventional weapons possible. Biden was very upset by that because his primary concern was to avoid a war breaking out with Russia. And it got so bad at one stage in the meeting that Biden says to Zelensky, your greatest want is to drag us into World War III, and we're here to see that that doesn't happen. And what you see, Zelensky wasn't very pleased with that, and Biden went away in a huff. And it's only in sort of the last year that the relationship has sort of stabilized

after that last Biden meeting over to Kiev and then to Poland where he made the big speech, where it's just stabilized. But this is something that most people didn't know. And I think most people assumed, as I did most of the war, that, you know, a joint threat like this, being involved in a war, you pretty much would form a real close personal alliance, personal feelings for one another. And that apparently has not happened. Well, you know, it's interesting when you think about what kind of a relationship these two must have had before the war, because let's not forget when Trump was president, Trump tried to get Zelensky to feed him dirt on Biden, right? And Biden's family, that was the whole reason behind the first impeachment process.

So Biden, plus, you know, Zelensky was the new president of a country that's reputation was all based on corruption, or a lot of it was. So Biden must have been somewhat hesitant on top of the issue that you raised, which is he didn't want to get into a war. He didn't want to slide into a war that could end up being World War III against Russia. So you can kind of understand a little bit of the hesitancy. But then when it started to get going, Biden still seemed to be the reluctant one of many of the leaders around the world who were, you know, all ready to get in there feet first to help Zelensky. Yes, and both had very, very different views at times. I mean, the Americans were also miffed a good deal, and certainly Biden was. When the Ukrainians didn't seem to take their initial warnings that the Russians were going to attack, you remember that period very well, when the Americans and the British were coming out and saying,

the evidence is overwhelming that the Russians are going to attack Ukraine on such and such a date, almost down to the hour. And the Ukrainians kept dismissing it as kind of hysteria coming from the West until it happened. And they pulled off their quite unprepared but miraculous fight off the early days. So that set the Americans' teeth on edge quite a bit. But, you know, to the Ukrainians, again, they're a younger generation. They didn't live really through the Cold War as leaders. And they didn't think immediately in terms of that nuclear exchange that anyone older in the sort of 60s and 70s and up would think of as a primary concern. So that was a dividing part right there. So, you know, Americans

angry that the Ukrainians didn't listen to their intelligence warnings, then the Ukrainians were coming on and saying, we need this, we need that, we need it now. And the Ukrainians are increasingly annoyed that the Americans are saying, well, we'll think about it, or we'll give you weapons, but only shoulder-fired weapons at first, or we'll give you mortars that can fire maybe four miles. We don't want to give you long-range rockets that could perhaps fire 30, 40 miles towards the Russian border. And this haggling sort of went on at a time when the world's watching Kiev virtually under attack, the nation fighting desperately for its life. And one can imagine what the emotional tension was inside the Zelensky bunker,

where even his life of him and his family is at stake, let alone as well as the nation. So there's this great divide there. It's funny, but Biden is also annoyed that the, maybe going back again before the war, that the Ukrainians had a nerve or Zelensky had the nerve to lecture him. This is a Biden's view. He's been dealing with Ukrainian politics a lot longer than Zelensky has. Because in the Senate, he used to deal with, you know, Ukraine after they have all the Soviet Union. As

vice president, he was in charge of American relations, looking after relations with Ukraine. So he's saying this former lawyer and comedian comes along and is teaching me about Ukrainian relations, I mean politics and the rest of it, that's insulting to me. And Biden gets angry when he gets insulted. He has a pretty fierce temper, though in fairness to him, he doesn't hold grudges

apparently, but he gets awfully angry in a hurry. He goes around calling somebody he doesn't like a horse's tail, which is good. I've never heard that before. Anyways, I think he thought of Zelensky as a horse's tail for a while, which, of course, historians are going to have fun trying to rewrite that section. Yeah, I bet. Let me ask you, do you get a sense of whether this was Biden kind of on his own resisting Zelensky or not falling for Zelensky at the beginning? Or was it also a push from the U.S. military saying, no, we can't give them this, we can't give them that?

I mean, it would be wrong to give them these things. I mean, we've seen it most recently with the F-16s, how long that took. But has there been resistance from the military as well, or is this a Biden thing? I think that there were several factors to that question. First thing, I think Jake Sullivan, the top foreign advisor, was cool as well off the beginning. But the military, they had two concerns. First of all, yes, we don't want to be sending in weapons that can suddenly strike inside Russia. The next week, we know we're in a bald, five minutes to midnight international crisis like the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the nuclear war is contemplated. We don't want that. But the other thing, Mr. President, we have to tell you, our stockpiles aren't that big, aren't that good. I mean, we think our military is actually stronger than it actually is. And we will give the Ukrainians what we can spare, but there's

a lot of areas where we don't have much to spare. And I think the Ukrainians thought this was a complete, you know, ludicrous excuse. They still had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of shells. They just didn't want to give them the shells. But over the years, military advisors and the intelligence community as well, they were very much part of this talking going on in the White House and the Situation Room. Both were saying factors like, well, you know, we really want to think this through, which is why Ukrainians were having their hair was standing on end hearing the Americans say, we don't think we can give you M1 tanks. No, no, no, no, no. They wouldn't be appropriate for Ukraine. Too heavy for the roads, where they need too much

training to use, where the technology is too severe. Then six months later, they say, well, maybe you could use M1 tanks after all, the Abrams tanks I'm talking about. And then three months after that, oh, yes, okay, we'll send you some. And of course, the tanks still aren't there. Or do the same thing with the fighter planes, when Biden comes out and says, we don't think the Ukrainians need the F-16. I mean, this is, you know, last fall when the war was, to say the least, you know, very hot. And Kiev was coming under daily bombardments from the air. Yes, they could have used F-16 to go after, you know, Russian firing sites and radar sites and the rest of it. So now they're going to wait till next year probably to see the F-16. So that kind of delay, which the military was probably, you know, to some extent urging on the president.

But I think that's the president's wish as well. He wouldn't be pushed in by the military. That's his basic feeling. But he's getting a lot of flack for it But he's getting a lot of flack for it. He's getting a lot of flack for it, interestingly, from retired American generals like Petraeus, who are coming out and saying they really had the Americans acted more swiftly. Yes, they've given the most by far. You know, they're a gigantic help in this war.

But we have to remember, they are the richest, most powerful military force in the entire history of the world. So there's no question they could have done more, and they could have done what they did faster. But there's a lot of criticism coming down that had the American aid and NATO aid come in sooner, this current counter-offensive would be going a lot better than it is right now. You know, you're our resident student of history. And so I want to draw upon that expertise because there's no guarantee in any major conflict that allied countries, their leaders are going to get along, that they, you know, like each other, agree with each other, respond to each other. There's no guarantee of that. And when you look back at history, is there anything that

compares to this, that we're witnessing the Biden-Zelensky relationship? Well, I think the one that first springs to mind is probably the most famous alliance in all of history, which was between Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in the White House in 1940, when basically Britain was desperate for American help. And Churchill began the long courting of FDR, and then they worked through the war. And they were so famous, they were in many ways the godfathers of the great victory, along with Stellan of Gorse. But it always seemed on the surface they were very best of chums. They were warm, friendly people. And in some regards, I think they very much had a lot of respect for each other.

But the fact is, these are A-type personalities, often difficult to get along. And Churchill often felt that Roosevelt could have acted sooner. He could have been more sympathetic to those early British pleas for help and could have listened to him more when Churchill gave his own strategic ideas of how the liberation of Europe should go. On his hand, Franklin Roosevelt, FDR, thought that Churchill was always nagging him or lecturing him for this or that or the rest of it. And, you know, Churchill was very, he was a very sentimental gentleman who would be, weep at the first sentiment, would rise up in a sentence. FDR was an absolutely charming individual but cold, so cold people used to call him feline and his distance, nobody ever knew really

how much he liked somebody or who he really liked. And you know, this went on for a long time during the war, periods of high stress. And near the end of the war, a friend of Roosevelt's, very concerned about the way he was looking, said, sir, you're looking awfully tired. Roosevelt said, so would you if you had had to carry Churchill on your back for four years. And that slipped out. That slipped out. But it gives a little bit of the animosity that's almost invariably going to be stirred up in that kind of relationship, even among men who, in a cooler moment, of course, would think very highly of each other and really respect each other. Any examples of ones who really didn't get along? Yeah. You didn't have to look very far because the figure of de Gaulle, of course, comes immediately to mind when that comes up as an ally you probably don't want to dream of.

Both Churchill and Roosevelt had terrible problems with de Gaulle. He was so contemptuous of his allies. He was so contemptuous of his friends that Churchill once threatened to throw him, put him in irons, you know, slap him in irons, as the expression goes. So on the eve of D-Day, Churchill, De Gaulle would listen to sort of the Allied advice and the Allied orders for this and that. And Roosevelt so disliked De Gaulle, he would have nothing to do with him. He didn't want to see him.

He didn't want to even hear about him, which unfortunately led to America seriously underestimating the free French force that de Gaulle stood for, and the future need for France as an ally. Of course, with de Gaulle, you always have to remember the famous saying of the French that de Gaulle is a person whose sole diet are the hands that feed him. In other words, you know, he will bite the hand that feeds him most assuredly and with the greatest nip of all. And of course, that's a lesson that Canada learned in 1967 when de Gaulle came over during centennial year, even during Expo, even stood on the balcony of Montreal. I was 100 feet away when he did it and screamed out, you know, vive le Québec libre. Right, I stabbed Canada smack in the back. You know, a friend of France, for sure. A country that had lost tens of thousands of its sons by, you know, in French territory to liberate or defend France.

So, yeah, these alliances sometimes can be very tenuous. It's worth noting, of course, that Pearson then proceeded to boot de Gaulle out of the country. Not in a firm enough way, many Canadians wanted him to frog march to the airport. Right. Just a last quick point. Clearly, there were difficulties between and are some difficulties between Biden and Zelensky.

But would it be fair to say that at this point, they're better now than they were two years ago? I think they are. I think the Americans now are really, you know, urging Ukraine on. They're very committed in seeing Ukraine take back as much land as it can, because it understands that this war will end in negotiations, ultimately. And there's more land that Ukraine can win back, the better it's negotiating, period. And I think Biden has come much more to see the stress that Zelensky's been under and the heroic, brilliant effort he waged to fight for Ukraine on behalf of Ukraine.

And I think Ukraine now seeing what maybe the alternative is a couple of years down the road, very much wants to see Biden strengthened, or at least a Democrat hopeful strengthened. All right. And for those wondering, once again, the name of that book is The Last President by Franklin Fore, F-O-R-E. And that should be available at bookstores right across Canada now. So if you can grab a copy, if you're interested in this, it sounds like a fascinating read.

Brian, as always, thanks so much. Talk to you again in a week. My pleasure. Thanks, Peter. Brian Stewart with us, as he always, thanks so much. Talk to you again in a week. My pleasure. Thanks, Peter. Brian Stewart with us, as he always is on Tuesdays. Great to have him with us to give us a better sense of that whole story. Okay, I'm going to bookend the show by ending on the same kind of topic that I started with, which is airplanes.

I love airplanes. And here is the story. Did you know that there was actually on most airlines, there is a temperature at which they switch on the air conditioning, but it's got to reach that temperature. And, you know, planes get awfully hot, especially on the ground in summertime or in heat waves like we've just been going through. They get quite hot during the boarding process, right? And you get on a plane and you're sweltering and you're going, give us some air.

There's a point at which they have to reach before they switch on the air conditioning. I did not know this. And I assume it's not universal. All airlines are different. I've only got two examples, neither of which is Air Canada. Sorry, I don't know what their rule is. But with American Airlines, I'm sure I'm going to get this. Somebody will call it in on Air Canada, one of the pilots probably,

as we hear from them quite often. American Airlines will let cabin temperatures reach 90 degrees before the company considers it too hot to board, according to an internal document reviewed by Politico, the American online news service. JetBlue Airways sees that threshold at 85 degrees, the airline said in a recent memo. After raising it from 80.

And federal regulators have no set uniform standards for cabin temperatures. That's the U.S. regulators, airline regulators. Now, so what's the problem? Why don't they just, come on, give us some air. Turn the air conditioning on when it gets above, you know, 80. Here's the reason. Keeping the cabins cooler, and I'm reading this from a political story, keeping the cabins cooler could require airlines to burn more fuel, potentially violating their pledges to lessen greenhouse gas pollution, or to delay boarding until temperatures drop, making it harder to keep flights running on time.

But aviation unions say Washington must act in yet another example of the conflicts that the planet's warming is created. So there you go. There's our climate change story for today. Trying to pop something in every couple of days, and there's two days in a row we've had something. So there you go. All right.

Enough for this day. Tomorrow is Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth with Bruce Anderson, Thursday. And if you've got cards and letters, send them in on any topic that we've had this week so far. Great Moors and Butts conversation yesterday. If you didn't listen to it, go back and listen. Lots of mail on that one. Or anything today or tomorrow. Write in themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com.

themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. I read them all. Some of them get used on Thursdays on your turn. Friday, good talk with Chantel and Bruce. That's it for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you again in 24 hours.