George Will was born in 1941 in Illinois. He has one memory of the war years. He was four years and three months old and his family was vacationing in Sandusky, Ohio on VJ-Day [Annotator's Note:Victory Over Japan Day, 15 August 1945] in August 1945. Horns were blaring and people were carrying on. He was told the war was over. In 1991, he remarried, and his new father-in-law was a veteran of World War 2 who had parachuted into Normandy the night before D-Day [Annotator's Note: Invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944]. He fought through to the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or Ardennes Counteroffensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945, Ardennes, Belgium] where he got frostbite and was sent home. Will's father taught Philosophy at Illinois [Annotator's Note: University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois] for 39 years. His father could not go into the service due to an injury, but he became a professor of math to military specialists, a good example of how the entire country went to war, unlike now. Everyone felt they were contributing to the war. Will studied in Britain during the 1960s. The British postwar experience taught Will how sheer exhausting the war had been. Besides the destruction, it caused loss of will in the British people.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer opens with talking of Ronald Reagan saying that America is exceptional because it was founded on ideals vs. blood and soil then asks for comments.] Historian George Will feels that America is a creedal nation, dedicated to a proposition contained in the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal. This makes us exceptional because to be American is to believe in something. This changes how we relate to other nations around the world as it projects us into the world in ways that other nations do not. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks what Will thinks about American isolationism before entering the war.] Will says that as a nation of immigrants, most came here to get away from there or "the quarrels of Europe" while retaining certain attachments. As the war approached, German and Italian Americans were ambivalent about it. It has been said that the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, storefronts in Little Italy, Manhattan, New York, removed their pictures of Mussolini because everyone had become Americans instantly. The Second World War fused us as a people. The fact that people came from over there to get away, meant they had to be talked into being concerned with going back or sending their sons back to fight. Roosevelt's [Annotator's Note: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] chore was astonishing, to convince this nation that what happened in Europe mattered. It took prolonged and subtle leadership to move the nation firmly into an international posture from which it has never retreated.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks historian George Will about his and his father's personal connections to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.] In 1905, George Will's grandfather was engaged to be married and his fiancée got very sick. The grandfather said to God, "if you will spare her, I'll be a minister." She lived and he enrolled at Gettysburg Seminary [Annotator's Note: Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania]. The American Civil War is the hinge of our history and Gettysburg [Annotator's Note: the Battle of Gettysburg, 1 to 3 July 1863] is the hinge of the Civil War. The Gettysburg Address [Annotator's Note: speech given by President Abraham Lincoln on 19 November 1863] is also the great oration of the war and arguably of our history. Once Americans got to thinking to extend and acknowledge the rights of all people things began to change. It not only moved Americans to include African-Americans in full participation, it gave America momentum in world policy. America has an inherent altruism. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Will if there are connections to World War 2.] Will says that if there had been no slavery, there would have been no Civil War, truism. World War 2 was brought on by a racist regime. Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] was not even a German or a German citizen until shortly before he became Chancellor. He was racialist and to an extent that is still not sufficiently appreciated. The Empire of Japan was very much the same. Racism was woven into the war itself. America changed after the war. African-Americans coming home were not going to be content. Americans having sacrificed so much, found something odd about the residue of racism in our country. World War 2 lit the fuse that blew up Jim Crow [Annotator's Note: Jim Crow laws, state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States from the late 19th century until 1965]. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks what in Lincoln's rhetoric did President Delano Roosevelt echo.] Lincoln was a classic orator, he could frame complex arguments. In the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, [Annotator's Note: The Great Debates of 1858; seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, Republican candidate for US Senator from Illinois and Senator Stephen Douglas, Democratic incumbent] the first speaker would speak for one hour, the second would then speak for one and a half hours, and the first would rebut for one hour. Roosevelt's oratory was a fireside "chat", intimate and brought by radio, needed informality and hominess as opposed to a Gettysburg Address.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer tells historian George Will that Americans were disappointed by World War 1 not being the war to end all wars, and asks how this affected the United States.] Will says the most important fact about the Second World War is in its name, Second. World War 1 was traumatizing, overly protracted and hideously bloody, when machine guns were introduced. This embittered Americans and created the cynical, lost generation of Hemingway [Annotator's Note: Ernest Miller Hemingway; American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman]. This made going into World War 2 not a light thing at all. It was a painful, grim, serious duty and not a crusade. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks what made Fascism and Communism desirable after World War 1.] Will says that faith in Democracy was a casualty of World War 1. The fighting faces of Fascism and Communism were people who wanted something to believe in. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer says that Robert Conquest was asked during an interview which was worse Nazism or Communism and he answered Nazism. He then asks Will, his thought.] Will says it is hard to choose which is more repulsive, Fascism or Communism. Fascism is rooted in race and nationality, with no claim to universality like Marxism preached. Communist regimes killed more people than Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] did and Mao [Annotator's Note: Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China and Chairman of the Communist Party of China from 1949 to 1976] more than Stalin [Annotator's Note: Russian Premiere Joseph Stalin]. The Third Reich lasted 13 years and the Soviet Union lasted 70.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks historian George Will about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's political challenges of 1940 to 1941.] Will says that leadership is getting people to do what they do not want to do. Roosevelt was guileful and not always candid and some of his actions were semi-legal. He would send ships into harm's way with the hope that harm would come of it. To that end, Lend Lease [Annotator's Note: An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States; H.R. 1776], was an important way to attach us to the British cause. CBS News and journalists such as Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Robert Trout, and Walter Cronkite were bringing the news and not giving a moral equivalence. Murrow was broadcasting from the rooftops of London, England during The Blitz [Annotator's Note: German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom in 1940 and 1941] essentially saying we are not spectators in this. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer says that Henry Kissinger referred to Lend Lease as Roosevelt's master stroke in moving things forward.] Will thinks that Lend Lease said to the Americans that we are going to give aid to help the British fight battles that we will not have to. It was the extra step that made us complicit in the British cause. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer notes that Will has a portrait of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in his office and asks about him.] Will feels that Churchill stood for bulldog tenacity and the power of the English language, spoke the language of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, he spoke in the language that resonates throughout American history. He was physically a bulldog too and was the embodiment of the British will and enormously sympathetic. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Will for his overall evaluation of Roosevelt.] Will states that Roosevelt conducted the most difficult thing to conduct, which is coalition warfare. Churchill was an aristocrat and democrat, Stalin a grotesque monster. Roosevelt underestimated Stalin. Most astonishing was organizing the American economy. Germany was defeated by the Red Army. Casualties on the Eastern front dwarfed those on the Western front. But the Red Army could not have done it without Detroit, Michigan. Detroit won the Second World War. We certainly fought our battles, but the greatest American contribution was the churning out of the military needs. Producing a ship every 18 days for example. We kept the Red Army in trucks. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks who in the American economy really stands out.] Will says that private enterprise became public very quick. Knudsen [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General William S. Knudsen, senior manager at Ford Motor Company], Kaiser [Annotator's Note: Henry J. Kaiser of the Henry J. Kaiser Company], and Ford [Annotator's Note: Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company] decided to make things other than cars. Seamlessly and quickly put to war. It was total war for a reason, everything was involved in war. Private enterprise's response to the government's needs was the wonder of the world. Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] had no idea what he was getting into declaring war on the United States.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks historian George Will about the Four Freedoms speech, the 1941 State of the Union address by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on 6 January 1941.] Will says that people wanted to know why we would fight in the war. After this speech, the people understood that it was something positive. The Four Freedoms are on the World War 2 Victory Medal [Annotator's Note: the World War 2 Victory Medal was established on 6 July 1945 and given to US Military who served between 7 December 1941 and 31 December 1946]. This was a war where we said we would not drop the ball afterwards. This time we will spread democracy and cooperation among nations. After this the United Nations was formed. The most important part of World War 2 is that it came second. We learned from the aftermath of World War 1 to have a better aftermath of World War 2. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks about President Harry S. Truman's performance after President Roosevelt died]. Harry Truman is proof of Bismarck's [Annotator's Note: German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Prince of Bismarck] quote that God looks after drunks, babies, and the United States. Will says that the Truman selection was an absent-minded choice for vice-president. They did not know they were picking a President and they were lucky. To govern is to choose on the basis of imperfect information. Picking Truman might have been the best thing Roosevelt did for the country. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer speaks of Truman in the Senate coming across a two-billion-dollar hole in the budget. He had discovered the Manhattan Project and ties it to the decision to drop the bombs. He asks Will if there is any significance to this.] Will says that Truman said that he never lost a moment's sleep on the decision to use the atomic bombs. It was stark, utilitarian calculus on what would serve American interests best. After the Alamogordo test [Annotator's Note: Trinity, code name for the first detonation of a nuclear device, 16 July 1945] we had the answer and then it was quick. Get the bombs to Tinian Island, Marianas on the Enola Gay and go. Will says there was lot of technology that changed the outcome of the war like radar, the Norden bomb sight, and radio. The technology that dominated the postwar period was rocketry. Von Braun [Annotator's Note: Wernher Magnus Maximillian Freiherr von Braun] in Alabama helped build the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile which dominated the Cold War. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks if the United States could have retreated into isolationism.] Will says that a lot of Americans wanted to withdraw from the world after the war. George Marshall's Plan [Annotator's Note: European Recovery Program, ERP, 1948] announced at Harvard University showed an enormous far-sightedness to have a stake in the revival of Europe and a stake in the revival of our adversaries. We did not want a repeat of the post-World War 1 experience. Marshall was important because Truman was not charismatic. Marshall had military integrity and the public trusted him. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer says that postwar, American politics were very bipartisan.] Vandenburg [Annotator's Note: Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg, US Senator from Michigan] had been an isolationist but changed his mind in public and cheerfully. He brought along other skeptics. Serious times and hot war were closely followed by cold war. The American nuclear technological lead was broken quickly. Not a time for partisan disputes.

George Will says that the Cold War was inevitable after World War 2 because Josef Stalin [Annotator's Note: Russian Premiere Joseph Stalin] was hostile to the outside world. The Red Army had won the war by heavy sacrifice and held ground they were not going to leave. It would have been sentimental nonsense to expect them to go home. Will says that when the guns fell silent, people knew it was going to be hard. Nations were real and here to stay, and the world was sadder but wiser in 1945. Communism did not have as much appeal now and had to be instituted by force. [Annotator's Note: Tape change. Restarts with interviewer asking about the importance of Breton Woods for postwar recovery and globalization.]. Breton Woods [Annotator's Note: the Bretton Woods Conference or United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference from 1 to 22 July 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire] was a simple fact, the dollar would be crucial to the velocity of trade and the velocity of trade would prevent the rise of new extremisms. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Will of the importance of the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials.] World War 1 was traditional in the sense that excesses were committed but the war plan was not a crime. The Germans and Japanese had atrocity woven into their objectives and their means. The post-World War 2 world needed a new mechanism to civilize vengeance. Obvious war criminals could not just retire. The Soviets had been an ally and were now judging them, so it was messy but an attempt at real justice. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks how the war led to the Civil Rights movement and changed women's roles]. World War 2 brought about emancipations, women and African-Americans began working together, integration began. de Tocqueville [Annotator's Note: Alexis de Tocqueville, French diplomat, political scientist, and historian] said revolutions occur when things begin to get better as people want to move faster.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks historian George Will why postwar American work went better in Europe than in Asia.] Will explains that in Europe, the war destroyed but maintained the skeleton of parliamentary democracy, a legacy of democratic politics and pluralist societies. Not so in the Far East. They had been colonized and were the play things of Imperial powers. The raw material of a postwar order was easier to replicate in Europe than in the peasant societies of the East. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer talks of the United States joining NATO in 1949.] Collective security was the natural response to the understanding that oceans cannot protect nations and there is no Fortress America. That's all NATO is. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer states that when President Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall, many saw it as the real end of World War 2 and asks Will to expound on Reagan's lessons from the war.] Reagan was a Democrat who admired Franklin Roosevelt and worked for Harry Truman. His political formative years were during this time of Democratic, Internationalist, Presidents, and he was a veteran of big debates. The Democrats had recoiled against the war in Vietnam and had been traumatized and had lurched to isolationist George McGovern. Reagan said he did not leave the Democrats, they left him. Vietnam syndrome, disengagement in the world was the biggest danger the United States faced according to Reagan. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer notes that when the Berlin Wall fell, it was called the end of history and asks Will to comment.] Will feels that the most important legacy of World War 2 is that we learned that the world is dangerous, always has been and always will be. The pretense is that we can invent institutions that tame the world, and that is a chimera. The lesson is that nations had better be prepared to wage war if they have any hope of winning a war. The theory of the end of history was that the ideologies had been exhausted. Will says that Al Qaeda did not get the memo and history returned. A melancholy lesson. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks how World War 2 fits within the overall arch of American history.] Will says that the American Revolutionary War created a country dedicated to a proposition; the American Civil War rededicated it to that proposition; World War 2 showed that there will be people who do not like that proposition and we still need to defend it. General Douglas MacArthur said that all military disasters can be summed up in two words: too late. Will thinks we have learned that lesson.