This morning, The Takeaway was joined by Randall Kennedy, author of "The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency." Co-host Celeste Headlee responds to the discussion and ponders whether or not President Obama might learn a lesson from his White House predecessor.

President George W. Bush has promised readers that his new memoir, "Decision Points," is unconventional. But is it really unique? Will readers be surprised? Or will his book, like so many presidential memoirs and biographies, fall flat?

Karen Holt joins us; she has written about other presidential biographies. She’s a former deputy editor of Publishers Weekly and contributes book reviews to O: The Oprah Magazine and Essence. She shares her opinions on "Decision Points," and presidential memoirs in general.

Today marks the eighth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, and we take a look back at the start of the war, when President George W. Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom. We also hear the reactions at the time, and an embedded journalist's descriptions of the fight on the ground.

The House Judiciary Committee has released almost 6,000 pages of documents that show that Karl Rove the former top political adviser to President George W. Bush played a critical role in the 2006 firings of a number of U.S. attorneys. Do the new documents support a charge of perjury? We talk to New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau.

A new examination by our partner The New York Times, shows that in 2002 top officials in the Bush administration for the first time signed off on the barbaric interrogation procedures, that in the past it had always condemned. And no one involved in that decision, from the President down through the House and Senate, knew the history behind the methods they had just signed off on. Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal didn't know of the history of these programs.

What was that history? According to several former top officials interviewed by the New York Times, the methods used by the CIA against terror suspects were taken from a military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. The program had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of Communist torture methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans during the Korean War. Obviously not something you want to pick up off the shelf and start using again. Here to present his report is New York Times reporter Scott Shane.

For more, read Scott Shane's and Mark Mazzetti's article, In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use in today's New York Times.

Yesterday, the White House released the so-called "torture memos" of the Bush administration. These memos detail the directives for what the Bush administration calls enhanced interrogation techniques. The release marked the most comprehensive public accounting to date of a program that some senior administration officials, and human rights groups, say included illegal torture. In advance of the publication of the memos, President Obama absolved the CIA from prosecution for the harsh tactics used in the interrogation of terror suspects. To explore these memos and their fallout, The Takeaway is joined by Jane Mayer, New Yorker writer and author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.

Yesterday the White House released four memos detailing the directives for handling terror suspects during the Bush administration. These so-called "torture memos" detail the sleep deprivations, slapping, holding, confinement with insects, and waterboarding that marked the interrogation techniques during the Bush years. John Hockenberry takes a moment to consider how these memos will look to future generations.

Ken Salazar always wore his signature Stetson hat, but the sheriff's badge is new. When he was handed the reins of President Obama's Interior Department, he discovered that the department had been operating like a frontier town with oil and gas leases sparking a modern-day gold rush, rather than a law-abiding governmental body. So Salazar pinned on the badge and is going about reinstating law and order. In Rolling Stone, Contributing Editor Tim Dickinson paints a portrait of the Interior Department under President Bush as an environment of "cronyism", "corruption", and "pervasive scandals" that will have a lasting effect on the environment and America's pocketbook. He joins The Takeaway to talk Wild West politics, the legacy of the Bush Interior Department, and whether Salazar looks good in a sheriff's badge.

An excerpt of Tim Dickinson's article, Obama's sheriff is available on Rolling Stone's website.

In one of his final press conferences yesterday, President Bush patted reporters on the back with one hand while his other hand pounded the podium in defense of his presidential decisions. The mercurial nature of the conference left us wondering, is there any connection between how a president leaves office and their post-presidential legacy? To answer that question we turn to David Eisenhower the director of the Institute of Public Service at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and grandson of President Eisenhower.

I've sipped the Kool-Aid. Not the Obama brand, or the McCain for that matter. It was labeled true democracy — flavored red, white and blue. I didn't drink it all mind you, just a sip. The first time I was able to vote was as an undergraduate in school in Atlanta — Clinton vs. Bush 41 in 1992. It was simple enough. I rolled out of bed, probably went to a class or two and strolled to the poll set up in Archer Hall, our auditorium at Morehouse College. No big deal, but a big deal — people died for me to vote, so it was my responsibility to show up. It was the same with Clinton vs. Dole in 1996. This time I was in graduate school in Washington, D.C. Clinton won, again. Whatever. And it was downhill from there.