MR. KOJO NNAMDIThere are plenty of stories about the ghost that supposedly haunt the White House. Someone have you believe that Abraham Lincoln's spirit is still lurking at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But regardless of whatever paranormal activity may actually be taking place there, Marvin and Deborah Kalb say it's the figurative ghosts of the Vietnam War that have truly haunted American presidents for the past 40 years.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIThat it's a conflict that's looming in the background in nearly every executive decision about national security, from presidents Ford to Obama, and that it's the moment that triggered many of cultural wars that still define American politics. Joining us to explore that legacy is Marvin Kalb. He is the Edward R. Murrow professor emeritus at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIMarvin spent 30 years as an award-winning reporter for CBS and NBC News. He was host of "Meet the Press," Moscow bureau chief and chief diplomatic correspondent. He is co-author of the book, "Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency From Ford to Obama." Marvin, always a pleasure.

MR. MARVIN KALBMy pleasure, Kojo.

NNAMDIJoining us also in studio is Deborah Kalb, co-author of this book. She's a writer and editor who has written for the Gannett News Service, Congressional Quarterly, U.S. News and World Report and The Hill, for the past 20 years or so. Deborah Kalb, thank you for joining us. She is also Marvin Kalb's daughter.

MS. DEBORAH KALBThank you very much.

NNAMDIBarack Obama is our first modern president who was too young to have fought in the Vietnam War.

KALBRight.

NNAMDIA lot of people hoped that his age and his experience would help the country drop the baggage carried by other leaders who were shaped dramatically by Vietnam. But you say that the ghosts of the Vietnam War are alive and well in the White House and that they're not likely to go away anytime soon. Why?

KALBI don't think that they are. Well, the evidence here, Kojo, is compelling. When President Obama was running for office, let's go back to 2008 now, and he was making the obligatory trip to the war zones. He had to go to Afghanistan and Iraq. While he went there, he went with two senators and while he was on this long 14-hour journey from Washington to Iraq, what is it that the three people talked about? Vietnam. The president wanted to know how the lessons of Vietnam affect presidential decisions.

KALBThis was before he was president. He already sensed that the ghosts were hanging around. When he came into office, at his first national security council meeting, the first thing out of his mouth was, Afghanistan is not Vietnam. So he -- already in his mind was the need to tell his people we're not going to deal with Afghanistan the way Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon or the other presidents dealt with Vietnam.

KALBWe're post-Vietnam. We're post-Cold War. And yet, as Bruce Riedel said -- he was the one who wrote the first Afghan study for President Obama. I think his words were, Debbie correct if I'm wrong, his words were Vietnam haunted or walk the corridors of the White House. Here is a guy who just walks in to do a job and he could sense it.

NNAMDIIn the long run, Marvin, to what degree that the realization that the United States was capable of losing a war affect the national psyche?

KALBOh, that's the key issue here. That is absolutely the key issue. I've been told by any number of Europeans or at least non-Americans that we -- that is non-Americans -- lose wars, win wars, we adjust. You in America had never lost a war up until Vietnam. And for a nation so proud of its tradition and justifiably so, so proud of its tradition suddenly to lose a war to a country Lyndon Johnson described as a, forgive me, raggedy-ass fourth-rate little country. That's Lyndon's words not mine.

KALBThat's the way he thought about Vietnam. But that little country defeated the great United States of America. So, anyone who has a responsibility for this country, namely the president, has to have in mind, wow, we might lose, we don't necessarily win.

NNAMDIMarvin Kalb is co-author of the book, "Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American President From Ford to Obama." Also joining us in studio is his co-author Deborah Kalb, who is also his daughter. If you'd like to join the conversation, to what degree do you think American presidents are still haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam? You can call us at 800-433-8850. Send us a tweet @kojoshow, email to kojo@wamu.org or just go to our website, kojoshow.org and join the conversion there.

NNAMDIDebbie, it's my understanding that the moment that sparked the idea for this book, for the father-daughter collaboration, was the 2004 presidential election and the so-called swift boat campaign that called John Kerry's military service in Vietnam into question. What was it about the Swift Boat Campaign that ultimately pulled you both down this rabbit hole, so to speak?

KALBYeah, that's a great question. That was, we started thinking about doing a book together around that point. And we originally -- this book went through a long journey. We originally have thought we would look at negative campaign advertising. And the Swift Boat ads being a prime example of that, we were going to look back also back into the '80s to look at the Willie Horton ads that were run against Michael Dukakis to look at other negative campaign ads that made an impact that candidates perhaps didn't respond quickly enough to.

KALBBut in the end, that didn't seem to generate that much interest out there. But what decided -- we'd already done a lot of research at that point on the Swift Boats and that was a really fascinating example of how something in a candidate's past could be used against him. It took him a while, John Kerry, a while to respond to these ads. They had to find him. Now he had presented himself as -- with Vietnam as a very important of his background.

NNAMDIAs a war hero.

KALBExactly. And then, before the public can really get that image firmly into their head, there was this attack against him by Swift Boat veterans who had served with him in some cases, at the same time as he did in some cases and really had taken a great dislike to him because of his work once he was back from Vietnam in anti-war veterans groups. And so, basically, they were able to define him before he could successfully fight back.

KALBHe took a while to take his time to answer those criticisms. By that point, a lot of people had seen those ads. And we were really struck by that. And in the end we decided, well, why don't we look at how the Vietnam War played a role throughout the past, well, since the war ended. We originally were going to go all the way back to the Truman presidency.

KALBTruman.

KALBAnd do it from Truman's to Obama. But at a certain point we decided, you know, so many people, Stanley Karnow, other people have done that so well, the period of the war itself. So we decided to focus on Ford to Obama and look at the legacy, both in terms of foreign policy and also politics.

NNAMDIMarvin, why do you think that that kind of attack still carried such a sting in 2004, nearly 30 years after the war had ended. And was that surprising to you?

KALBIt was surprising. Actually, it was. The lethality of these charges was surprising to me because one would think that after 30 years, these things would just tend to go away. Well, what we found and one of the things that's so remarkable and I think in the research and the end product, the book, is that there's a fascinating play involving presidential biography, what did each president's relations with Vietnam have to do with power, then the war itself, the first one we ever lost.

KALBThen, if you're in office, how do you respond? All of them were affected by Vietnam, but all of them responded in different ways. I mean, for example, Reagan. Reagan, you know, the City on the Hill, everything is marvelous about America. We're terribly strong. We're back and all that. Two hundred and forty one U.S. Marines were murdered by terrorists in their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, October 1983.

KALBWhat did Reagan do? He pulled out. Why? He said because the American people were spooked by Vietnam. That's his verb. Spooked by Vietnam and he didn't want to put them through that again. Then you go to a president like Clinton, who walked around all of the time saying that he felt guilty that he had not served in Vietnam and he didn't want us to get involved in that kind of a war. You know, so you have people like Bush I, who went in with 500,000 troops and then you have Clinton who wouldn't put a foot on the ground, and yet, there was Vietnam over both.

NNAMDIWell, you've got to wonder because when Reagan decided not to go to Beirut, he apparently also decided that he wasn't going to get into a situation unless the use of American power was overwhelming. Was that the seeds of what became known as the Powell Doctrine?

KALBOh, absolutely, absolutely. Reagan was the one who put the idea in his defense secretary's head, Caspar Weinberger, at the time that if we're going to go into something, we're not going to have mission creep the way we had in Vietnam. We're not going to have any lack of clarity about what we are doing and when we go in. We're going to make absolutely sure that we have overwhelming force. We're going to go in fast.

KALBWe're going to get out fast. We will have an exit strategy. That then went Weinberger, which then went to Powell, and hugely influenced Bush I when he sent 500,000 troops to kick Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991.

NNAMDI800-433-8850 is the number to call if you'd like to join the conversation. At what point do you think the Vietnam War will start casting a smaller shadow over American politics? 800-433-8850. We're discussing the book, "Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency From Ford to Obama," co-authored by Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb, both of them journalists here in the Washington area. And you can also send us a tweet @kojoshow.

NNAMDIDebbie, you know that until 1992 every successful presidential candidate since World War II had some kind of military service in their background. That changed with Bill Clinton, an accused draft botcher who defeated World War II heroes in back to back elections. What do you think explains that shift?

KALBYeah, that's a great question. I think that basically service in Vietnam seems to have played a different role than service in other wars. I don't think that it has -- it's not the same pattern as before and I think that what was interesting was that, yes, Clinton managed to defeat two World War II heroes. I mean, he defeated…

NNAMDIGeorge H.W. Bush and Bob Dole.

KALBYes, exactly. And in -- he did this in 1992 and 1996. In 2000, you had an election where -- very, very close election where Al Gore had gone to Vietnam, had been an Army journalist. George W. Bush had served in the Texas Air National Guard and not gone to Vietnam and Bush was the one who won. And then as we were talking about a few minutes ago, John Kerry, war hero in Vietnam, was defeated in 2004. And then we had 2008, John McCain, POW in Vietnam, you know, spoke often about his experiences.

NNAMDIA war hero.

KALBAnother war hero. And he lost to Barack Obama who was of a generation that wouldn't have gone to Vietnam, but had no military service. So I think, in a way, Vietnam turned everything upside down and it wasn't quite the same after that.

NNAMDISo when you look at the list of Republican candidates in this early field for 2012, you don't really see a candidate, any candidate with strong military ties. This could set up a race in 2012 when neither major party candidate is associated with military service. What significance do you see in that?

KALBI think that's really fascinating, because we could end up -- I mean, in the book, we have several generations of presidents that were talking about the generation of -- the first few presidents that we have in the book were of the World War II generation. They fought in World War II or just missed fighting in World War II. Then we have the baby boomer generation who either somehow avoided going to Vietnam or served in the National Guard, or did go to Vietnam.

KALBObama represents sort of a third generation of presidents that we're looking at. We could end up with an election with two candidates who were too young to have served in Vietnam. We could -- I mean, if Mitt Romney's the GOP nominee, we could end up with someone who was at that generation. But, you know, the other candidates, most of them were too young, like Obama, to have served.

KALBSo it will be interesting to see how that legacy plays out if you do end up with candidates who both either didn't serve or too young to serve. And I think what's really interesting is that you can probably still see the legacy in the discussion over Afghanistan, over troops, over other foreign policy questions like Libya and the War Powers Act. But in terms of personal experience, you could be at a point where that is no longer going to be relevant.

NNAMDISpeaking of personal experience, let's go back to one of the presidents from World War II. You took things all the way back to President Ford, the man who had to step into the West Wing in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War. You write that his approach to foreign policy was defined by his worries that both our allies and our enemies would see the United States as a paper tiger.

KALBRight.

NNAMDIAs I recall, that was one of Mao Zedong's favorite phrases to discuss.

KALBYeah. And it was picked up by Richard Nixon. And that was his great fear that somehow or another we would lose. Richard Nixon's idea was interesting. If I were going to -- he wanted very much for the United States to have an honorable withdrawal from Vietnam, however that be defined. But it be honorable, that we don't lose in the way, in fact, that we did. When he left office, ignominiously, and then Ford came in, within three weeks after Ford the president in -- it was three weeks after April 30, 1975, the very end of the Vietnam War.

KALBWithin three weeks, Cambodian pirates saved him a merchant ship called the Mayaguez. Well, you could have heard what was going on in the National Security Council meeting. Kissinger was pounding the table saying, we must take action because otherwise if we lose in Vietnam, three weeks later we do nothing here, it will be horrible. We've got to do something. We've got to show the world that we are still very strong.

KALBAnd Ford bought into that, hook, line and sinker. And he brings aircraft carriers. He brings cruisers. He brings the Marines. Everybody was there to take care of a number of pirates. I mean, it was an absurd, unreal overbalance of...

NNAMDIBut what's notable about that, and you point out in the book that some of the men who would shape American foreign policy for decades to come after that moment were directly involved in that Mayaguez incident.

KALBThat's right. And they would sit back -- I mean, for example, somebody like Rumsfeld who was at that time the defense secretary. Rumsfeld at that time was all for the use of every kind of force in order to make sure that, you know, that the United States would not be perceived as weak. Every time you get into these things, Kojo, what happens in the mind of the policy maker is, one, we cannot appear to be losing. Two, we have to appear to be winning.

KALBAnd certainly to appear as if we know what we're doing. We go from one step to another. And Vietnam left such -- I was going to pick up on Debbie's point before that you can in fact go to another generation, that's in terms of age. But they then pick up the responsibilities of office. And when they walk into the Oval Office, the same kind of challenges will face them. What are they to do with another Libya? Where is their mind? It's not on today, it's on what happened yesterday, and back in the Vietnam days. Even if you changed the fact, the vocabulary and the thought process, it's the same.

NNAMDI800-433-8850 is the number to call. Dawn your headphones, Debbie and Marvin, because we're now about to go to the telephones. We will start with Neil who is in Shady Grove, Md. Neil, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

NEILHey, Kojo, you know, just to answer your question about when will we live down Vietnam, I think that a lot of left-leaning political operatives invoke the name Vietnam in order to shake up everyone and to get everyone really concerned. And there's another point that your -- when guest made, you know, we have to appear that we're winning. You know, it's interesting how in Vietnam we appeared to be winning up until the set of incident in '68 when reality hit.

NEILAnd I think it was Howard Cossell who said even he thought that it was an untenable situation. I'll take your response off the air.

NNAMDIMarvin?

KALBWell, it was certainly true that the United States was competitive in Vietnam up until the Tet offensive, but it certainly was not winning. And the strategy of General Westmoreland was to kill as many of the enemy as possible, and then make an assumption that if you killed a number of them, or most of them, or more of them than you thought existed, then somehow you're gonna be closer to victory.

KALBIt was only when General Abrams came in in 1969, and General Westmoreland was released in '68, that the entire American strategy changed from going to killing to trying to go to something called the counter insurgency strategy, which, by the way, is exactly the strategy taken from the Vietnam experience of General Abrams and transported by General Petraeus into Afghanistan.

KALBAnd General McChrystal before Petraeus. They wanted very much to do what General Abrams had done, and the Pentagon was attuned to that idea, and they still are. And that is what makes the issue of President Obama right now. How many troops is he gonna pull out of Afghanistan, so central. Is he gonna pull out a lot on an assumption that we've just killed Osama bin Laden and therefore there's no reason for us to be there anymore? Or is he gonna live with the fear that if he pulls out a lot of them, and our military position is thus weakened, we end up maybe losing Afghanistan? What do you do then?

NNAMDIAnd Debbie, to talk about how the political and partisan -- how the ideological and particle political lines get skewed as a result of this thinking. In the contemporary environment, House Republicans, even as we speak, seem to be forming a coalition with anti-war Democrats to challenge the president's authority to continue to U.S. mission in Libya. What do you make of this moment?

KALBYeah. That's really interesting because it goes right back to Vietnam. I mean, the war powers that came out of the Vietnam War, and Congress is concerned that they were not as involved as they felt they should be in decision making. And that's been a constant all the way through in terms of who really does have the power to declare war or to get the U.S. involved in a war or to decide how long the war's gonna go on for, and exactly what is a war. And I think that that's all being discussed right now with the Libya situation.

KALBHow involved can the U.S. get? How do you define whether it's okay to be this involved versus that involved, how can the president make that decision without Congress having a say in it, and it's -- it does, again, it goes right back to the questions that we talk about in the book. So it's, again, a piece of the legacy of Vietnam.

NNAMDIThe book is called, "Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama." We're talking with its co-authors Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb. Inviting your calls at 800-433-8850. A number of you have called already, stay on the line. After this short break, we will get to your calls.

NNAMDIWelcome back to our conversation with Marvin and Deborah Kalb. They are co-authors of the book "Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama." Deborah Kalb is a writer and editor who has written for the Gannett News Service, Congressional Quarterly, U.S. News and World Report and The Hill. Marvin is the Edward R. Murrow Professor Emeritus at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.

NNAMDIHe was Moscow Bureau Chief and host of "Meet the Press" at NBC. He spent 30 years as an award-winning reporter for CBS and NBC News. That said, back to the telephones where several callers await us. We will start with John in Vienna, Va. John, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JOHNYes, hello. Just a second, let me get to a quiet place. I'm the age of young men who were draft age in 1A while we were in college in Vietnam. I was deferred because of the high draft number. And I think those of us of this generation are gonna have to, you know, exit the scene to -- for this legacy to be gone. If you -- sorry, I'm not a very eloquent person, but if you served in Vietnam, you feel dishonored because people didn't care.

JOHNAnd if you didn't serve, or you -- looking at it the way I did, the country lied to us, many of us, we felt like that was the first time. It's an indelible stain. It'll take forever to erase that.

NNAMDIYou think so, Marvin?

KALBWell, it's gonna -- excuse me. It's gonna take a very long time without any doubt. My point here, time and time again, and forgive me if I'm repeating something, Vietnam happened. It's over. It's done. What lives on today is the legend of this war. And for a lot of people, as John just said, for a lot of people, this will never go away. This book is dedicated to my brother, Bernie Kalb, a great, great journalist. For someone like Bernie who covered the Vietnam war, this is a story that he cannot forget.

KALBThis is a story that he thinks about in the middle of the night, because it took so much out of us as a nation. Now, the legacy of the war continues, and we're gonna have to live with that for a long time yet to come.

NNAMDIThank you for your call, John. Here is Mumin (sp?) in Chantilly, Va. Mumin, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

MUMINThanks for having me. Can you speak about the legacy of what happened in Mogadishu Somalia, Black Hawk Down? Whether that continues -- that legacy continues to shape our policy towards Somalia. And which president should be responsible for what happened in Mogadishu Somalia? Thank you.

NNAMDIMogadishu Somalia, there was also the ill-fated episode during President Carter's regime in Iran, but I'm not sure those carry quite as much weight at Vietnam. Marvin?

KALBWell, they don't. And maybe unfortunately they don't, but we are at a time now when the country can forget certain things, and I think they try to forget Africa more than they should. I mean, for example, I remember very well that during the Clinton administration, when the question came up at that time about what are you going to do in Burundi. Well, the United States could have done something, but chose to do practically nothing because the Congress and the White House were in unity at that time on not getting involved, and that came right out of the Vietnam experience too.

NNAMDIEight hundred thousand people ultimately being killed in Rwanda...

KALBYes. Yes.

NNAMDI...and Burundi in what turned out to be a terrible genocide there. It's one thing to take the lessons of Vietnam into account when it comes to Afghanistan, it's another to take into account the lessons of Afghanistan. To what degree do you think the aftermath of the '80s and '90s in Afghanistan is weighing on the president's mind right now with this decision on troop levels?

KALBWe talk in the book about Afghanistan throughout the whole period. And as people know, that was an area first where the British tried to get involved. It was an area where the Russians tried to get involved. It's an area where the U.S. in involved. During the period where the Russians were involved, we have a section in the Carter chapter especially, where Zbigniew Brzezinski talks about the idea of Russia's Vietnam.

KALBI mean, Afghanistan being Russia's Vietnam and trying to get Russia lured deeper into that -- their own quagmire, which it turned out to be for them as well. And I think that Afghanistan has a history of drawing people -- foreign powers in there, and they don't come out of it easily. So I think that that's certainly on the minds of the people making the decisions right now about how many troops to draw down and how quickly to do it.

NNAMDIMarvin?

KALBMay I just add this one point? Debbie mentions the Brzezinski role in this. In the book, I'm very happy to say that we have in there -- we have had access to cables, memos that Brzezinski wrote to President Carter on a weekly basis. Handed it to him, what his views were. What is utterly remarkable, Kojo, is the way an NSE advisor can plot with a president, getting the Russians into their Vietnam how, by getting all of these Muslim fanatics, Mujahideen on our side by giving them money, by giving them weapons, so that they can fight the Russians.

KALBWe are now fighting the very same people whom we equipped with guns 20 and 30 years ago. And Brzezinski had this thing in his head, and he was absolutely right except for one thing. He was right in what happened to the Russians. But he once said, what's more important, bringing down the Russian Empire, the Communist system, or just dealing with a bunch of Muslim fanatics?

KALBWell, we have our hands full now with people defined as Muslim fanatics, but certainly a culture that we don't know how to deal with as yet.

NNAMDIHere is an email we got from Scott. "I was 18 during the last years of Vietnam, and had hoped that lessons learned would keep us out of other ill-advised wars for many years in the future. It seems to me, a healthy respect for the difficulty of engaging in a regional conflict with guerilla warriors should lead to more caution. I believe that military advisors recommended such caution, but Bush civilian leadership overruled them. War," says Scott in this email, "is no substitute for diplomacy."

KALBWell, it's a very good point. One would have imagined that after Vietnam people would be much more cautious. And the fact is, a number of the presidents, as we write about in the book, a number of the presidents were very cautious. Ronald Reagan, you wouldn't think it by his public image, but Ronald Reagan was the most cautious of them all.

KALBClinton, very, very cautious. Obama, I believe, would love to be cautious, but he's getting in very, very deep. He tripled the size of the American force commitment to Afghanistan.

NNAMDIHere is J.J. in Washington D.C. J.J., you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

J.J.Yes, thank you, Kojo. Yeah. I want to continue that line of thought where once a president gets into office, you know, the people that surround him, that advise him, you know, they're basically gonna be hawks to begin with. There's gonna be your general chief of staff, all the Army people, all they want to do is continue the war basically, for the most part.

J.J.And it seems to be that Obama's gonna be facing a situation that Johnson was after the Tet offensive, where he basically -- him and Kissinger are basically trying to, you know, basically save his own re-election versus putting American lives at risk, and never mind the Vietnamese people that were killed during that time. I mean...

NNAMDIDebbie...

J.J....at this point, you know, Obama is very close to that same situation now.

NNAMDIOkay. Debbie, to what extent do political calculations having to do with election, and in particular, re-election, play a role in these kinds of decisions?

KALBWell, I think the caller mentioned President Johnson. I think he's always in the minds of a lot of presidents that came after him, as a sort of sad example of what not to emulate. Unfortunately for President Johnson, because he had some amazing policies in the great society that were put into place, but it all got overshadowed by Vietnam, and he couldn't pay for everything and Vietnam took over. And, you know, he had won landslide election in 1964, and in terms of running again, he pulled out.

KALBHe didn't even seek re-election in 1968 because of the war. And, you know, he died just a few years later. I think -- we talk in the book about how presidents were haunted by the image of Lyndon Johnson, by him sitting there picking out bombing targets, and that was not something that any president wanted to be perceived as. So I think politically they want to stay as far away from the image Lyndon Johnson as they can. And I think that with President Obama up for re-election now, he has to make a really tough call now.

KALBBecause he can get accused by political opponents either way he goes. If he pulls out troops too fast, it can get back to the whole idea of losing the war, losing another conflict. If he stays in, it's a question of well, what about our economy. We need to money for all these other things. So he's in a very tough situation right now.

NNAMDIBetween the proverbial rock and hard place. J.J., thank you very much for your call. This project was really a family affair. How did you two go about, if you will, dividing and conquering this work that needed to be done between the two of you? How was that broken down?

KALBI'm gonna let Debbie go first.

KALBWell, okay. I mean, my father's definitely the senior partner in this effort. I would say that he did most of the first draft of most of it. I did most of the second draft. I did some of the first draft of some of it, but I would say that is more or less how we did it. I think that he has such and background on covering so many of these presidents for so many years, covering their foreign policy decisions, that it was a real pleasure to work on all this with him and sort of get to learn even more from him than I have.

NNAMDIBut it's my understanding, Marvin, that she's the politics wonk in this decision.

KALBShe is the politics wonk and I'm the foreign policy wonk in this kind of thing. And I yielded almost completely on the domestic stuff to Debbie. But one of the great secrets that you learn is if you want to do a book with a partner, make sure you have a daughter like Debbie. That's the best -- that's the first requirement that you've gotta have. And then if she says to you, daddy, I think you're right about this, she's probably right.

NNAMDIYou're supposed to listen. But Debbie, it is my understanding that you actually think that the most gifted editor in the Kalb family is neither your father nor you.

KALBThat's true. It's actually my mother who has -- has written a book of her own on -- it's called "The Congo Cables." But she's edited a number of my father's previous books, and yes, she's definitely the great editor in the family.

NNAMDIWell, the book co-author by Deborah and Marvin Kalb is called, "Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama." Marvin Kalb is Edward R. Murrow Professor Emeritus at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University. He spent 30 years as an award-winning reporter for CBS and NBC News, including stints at chief diplomatic correspondent, Moscow Bureau Chief, and host of "Meet the Press." Marvin, thank you so much for joining us.

KALBThank you, Kojo, for having us.

NNAMDIDeborah Kalb is a writer and editor who has written for the Gannett News Service, Congressional Quarterly, U.S. News and World Report, and The Hill. Debbie Kalb, thank you so much for joining us.

KALBThank you.

NNAMDIThe book once again is "Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama." Thank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.