Word has it Michael Beschloss’ most recent book can be found on many a Capitol Hill nightstand.

And if there’s one lesson the presidential historian hopes America’s powerful learn, it is this: Finish the job.

Beschloss details America’s destroy-and-rebuild approach during World War II in “The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany 1941-1945.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt made sure that America not only won the war but also that Germany did not rise again, and the Bush administration would be wise to use similar methods with Iraq, Beschloss said in an interview Sunday.

“We really do have to fight this war to absolute victory and topple Iraq,” he said.

Then, he said, the administration has to be prepared – just as America was after World War II – to keep troops stationed in the country where they can build a free press, fix the educational system and establish democracy.

Beschloss spoke Sunday evening at the Lied Center, where a nearly full-house crowd had assembled for the second installment of The Presidential Lecture Series.

But not all of his comments were so serious. In fact, his anecdotes – including many from Lyndon B. Johnson’s secret White House tapes – drew several bursts of laughter.

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss was the second speaker in the Dole Institute of Politics Presidential Lecture Series Sunday at the Lied Center at Kansas University.

“You learn the way that a president acts in private when you do this kind of work,” Beschloss said.

He described one conversation Johnson had with a department store manager regarding the purchase of some tailor-made slacks.

The store-bought ones just wouldn’t work, Johnson was recorded as saying. Instead, they felt as if he were “riding a wire fence.”

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In his introduction, Richard Norton Smith commended Beschloss for getting a sense for the nonpublic lives of presidents.

“This is fly-on-the-wall history,” said Smith, director of the Dole Institute of Politics, which sponsors the lecture series.

And audience members, many of whom were in the over-50 crowd, seemed to enjoy the stories as well.

“He’s talking about history that we’ve lived through,” said Emmett Mitchell, Lecompton. “He has a balanced view, and he can tell you things that make some of these people real characters.”