, whether it was president eisenhower with the israelis in the '50s. you actually have negotiations at stake between the two warring parties. so this is -- this has been a very bad moment in the history of their context, yes. >> so, robin, just crystallize this for our viewers if you can. a lot has been made between the personal relationship. not so warm between president obama and netanyahu over the past eight year, but at the policy level, what is at the center of this? >> well t obama administration had worked very hard during the second term to try to get these parties together and i think they felt they were consistently undermined by the settlement policy and that's really what crystalized them in a vote to criticize israel for the settlements. it's also criticism for the palestinians but that, of course, is what made the headlines and this is at a moment, unlike the bush administration and clinton administration. they've not been able to get these two parties to the table at the end of an administration, and so it wanted to leave a record of what peace should look like to outlin

. >> hoover and fdr didn't speak to each other. dwight eisenhower thought jfk he called little boy blue. innocent, naive celebrity type. didn't like him and had a cranky transition. i'm a big ike fan. that was really unfortunate. ike did not talk to jfk about fighting communism in any kind of coherent intelligent way and what we got was the bay of pigs. there was a cost for that bad transition. a real cost. so there's a long history. partly because especially when it's opposing parties. they've been banging away at each other all through an election. they don't like each other by the time the election day rolls around. you have scratchy transitions. this goes back to jefferson and adams. i think adams' people called -- jefferson's people called adams and there's a long history of these things. >> i can recall you covering the adams administration and jefferson administration. what's your instinct having covered the situations for years? given the fact that donald trump is relatively -- he's inexperienced in terms of governing and even becoming president of the united states, who wouldn'

coming at clinton. eisenhower saw the presidency as a pyramid. it better be extraordinarily important. bill clinton saw himself in the center with all of the arrows pointing to him. that caused chaos and that changed very quickly as david said when leon panetta came in and brought order to that structure. you wonder if that's something that might happen over the next couple of years here. >> how will it jive with a strategy that's disruptive? a figure that's undisciplined. i'm sitting here thinking about a number of things as you rub my shoulder. one, what does it mean to liken this today, 2016, 2017, to 1971, 1972? the world seems to be dramatically different in a number of ways. i want to see what those differences are. what does it mean to think about intensifying this relationship? whether triangulating or triangular move that david ignatius talked about. when you have afghanistan, iraq, yemen, syria, what does it mean to add this onto that and then to talk about it being undisciplined. i'm just really concerned. >> it's possible that instead of there being a strategy here, a thre

used to be called daytont was a republican presidential tradition that began with eisenhower and went to nixon and reagan was the great. the place to begin is syria but there are other places to begin. >> what do you think about what russia is doing? >> they want a settlement. germans and french brokered a negotiated settlement. the kiev government, which we support, won't sign it. i don't know what trump is going to do about it. it's a negotiable settlement and the alternative is war. >> what should american allies think about what's going on in crimea today? >> what should they think? shouldn't they be concerned and welcome influx of nato support and american support? >> into crimea? >> no. into other areas bordering the former soviet union that may be concerned that russia may do the same thing to them. >> you're operating under the assumption that what russia did in crimea may be a precedent? >> i'm not the only one that raised that concern. people that live in the region. >> they were the ones begging the united states to allow them to enter into nato. >> that's absolutely true.

. >> interesting, mika, i went back and i've been talki ining t eisenhower and how eisenhower selected people that ran his cabinet which eisenhower is considered one of the most successful administrators in eight years of peace and prosperity. i went back and i read the ambrose book again last night just to sort of refresh my recollection. as he builds his -- listen to this. this is what steven ambrose wrote about eisenhower's cabinet and who does it sound like. a major critical part of presidential leadership, eisenhower knew, was selecting the right men for the right jobs and working with them. he wanted competent proven administrators. men who thought big and acted big. always impressed by successful businessmen who made it on their own and knew how to run huge organizations. he sought out the high achievers. men he could turn to for advice and with whom he could share both responsibility and praise. personal friendship counted for nothing. in selecting his cabinet and white house staff, eisenhower did not pick a single old friend. some of the most prominent selections were of men he had n

have a healthy distrust of combat. you know, one of my favorite quotes is from eisenhower who said, i hate war only like a soldier who can hate war. the stupidity. i hope mattis is of that belief. he's a thoughtful person from what i've read. both he and general kelly who lost a son, i think they are not people who are eager for wanton combat or wanton killing. >> senator, we just had your colleague, senator corker on, and i am going to ask you the same question i asked him. seeing that the -- that russia has very publicly declared cyber war on us, what do we do? >> you know, i think we have to defend ourselves. i think -- i agree with senator corker that it is everywhere all the time and we have to assume that it is occurring and that all nations that have the ability to use cyber warfare are using it to their benefit or trying to use it to their benef benefit. so the key is we have to protect ourselves. that's the answer to this whole thing about whether the dnc was hacked or not. if there was any evidence, we should investigate it because we need to protect ourselves, our governmen

. and eisenhower, i was talking yesterday about stephen ambrose's description of eisenhower as only wanting to hire people that he didn't know, who couldn't ford to do the job, which were people who were running huge corporations. and didn't need the job, but instead, were doing it in part for public service. it seems that trump in this process has gone a long way from initially wanting to hand out this position as a sort of a patronage job to rudy giuliani to selecting somebody that two weeks ago he didn't know. and it sort of checks off the boxes that ike was always looking for in his cabinet secretaries. >> exactly. and the other, to me, the thing that struck me the most about this is the bet on tillerson is basically the bet that trump asked the country to make on him. which is, i have been in pursuit of private profit. i have been in pursuit of my own business interests all these years. now i'm going to go work for you. and i have been successful in the private sector so i'm hoping to translate that success into the public sector. to some extent, i don't know this, but my sense

, it reminds me, i'm sure you read the book on eisenhower. it was the first of its kind to really dig into eisenhower's thought process being president of the united states. eisenhower shows people he didn't know for top positions and didn't want a lot of friends close by in the top positions like state and defense. but said he wanted people in eisenhower's words "that couldn't afford to work for me." it looks like trump by getting all of these people from goldman and exxon mobil and other corporations may be doing the same thing here. >> you know, he's taking people who don't need the jobs and in that sense are attractive. you look at the lineup, mattis, general kelly at dhs and now tillerson, these are tough guys. if you want to look at the oil business, tillerson is famous for his i.q. exxon is a smart, well run company. he's not the guy that goes out and makes deals and pats people on the back which is part of the oil business. i think that side of diplomacy he's going to have to start from a low base. >> how concerned are you, rick, with the putin side of this story, which really

. they're so proud to do . >> so, willie, dwight eisenhower had the belief that he didn't want to appoint anybody to the cabinet that could afford to work and the idea was i want to get ceos at the top of their game and when they come to washington, it's going to be for public service. i don't want professors. i don't want think tank types. i want people out in the wohl rorld that have run big companies and that can run these bureaucracies. >> this should not be a surprise to anyone that watched the presidential campaign for the last year and a half. he talked i'm going to send carl icahn to china. the message of his campaign was think outside washington. think outside the conventional bureaucrat. who are people out in the world who actually get things done. you can disagree with that but you shouldn't be surprised by the choices he's made. >> sam, we were sit hearing wondering how erratic donald trump would be and how erratic his appointments would be. they've been consistent. they've been extraordinarily consistent ideologically and as willie said, they are basically the type of

changes everything. you know, there might never have been a dwight eisenhower presidency, a john kennedy presidency, or a ronald reagan presidency or going to the moon without pearl harbor. >> unbelievable. steve kornacki, let's talk quickly about the president-elect. a lot of vote recounts. a lot of news coming in and out. where do we stand right now? >> where we stand is i think california now has finally finished after three, four weeks. they have all the votes counted out there. here's the stat for you. it looks like hillary clinton will finish with more popular votes in the 2016 election than barack obama got in 2012. so that gap is going to approach 2.8 million. >> my goodness. >> by contrast, if you think of the last time we had the split back in 2000, it was about half a million, about 500,000. she's going to win by almost six times the margin in the popular vote than al gore did back in 2000. yet, donald trump will finish with over 300 electoral votes. we said during this campaign, every time i was on the set, we said narrow path for donald trump. that's what it was. he'

of what i read about eisenhower when he was setting up his cabinet. he had a saying, he didn't want anybody working for him who could afford to work for him. he brought in a lot of corporate leaders. i didn't actually know them. he heard about their reputations, heard they were good business people and brought them in. it looks like that's the direction trump is doing except he knows the people. unlike ike, who didn't trust people he knew to work for him, trump is going in the opposite direction. >> gene is right, it's not populist, not working class. policy matters more than anything else. there are two things that i think some people with a government mentality or washington mentality may not boo taking into account. a lot of these people are from the business world, not from the government world. and a lot of them haven't lived in washington, d.c. a lot of trump voters -- >> what's also interesting, his two economic picks, democrats. >> but they're people who never worked a day in government for the most part, and people who have a different mentality. >> could be really interest

created by eisenhower and nixon but never created. it was a lie. they knew it was a lie but it was effective. it was nixon in '72, not '68 but '72 that talked about his secret peace plan with vietnam. of course three or four years later they asked about the secret peace plan and he said there was never a secret peace plan. politicians do lie. perhaps this is more jarring because it happens in real time and happens so quickly. >> i think it's more concerning for us today because it's not just our politicians that are doing it. we're now giving our children and grandchildren the idea that news can be fake. i think that's what you would agree with. because everything has been said now by our leading politicians, younger people are now thinking in the same way. and they think, my god, i can make up something and get on the air and talk about it. one thing when you talk about a missile crisis and then you're running for office and then afterwards you say maybe it wasn't as big as we thought it was. when you run for office, you believe what you're saying anyway. lbj believed that his gra