Welcome susan rice to afterwards. It is a fascinating book with a personal tale and chronicle of your professional life but lets begin with the Current Crisis with the president of ukraine in july a whistleblower reported in august and it was released in the last week. What do you make of the whistleblowers complaint . What is so extraordinary is that now we have in blackandwhite the president s own words the fact that when hes conducting business on behalf of the United States with foreign leaders hes conducting his own personal business is personal political business but if you read the transcript not once did the president of the United States raise anything that is National Significance to the United States of the sovereignty of ukraine has been violated by russias invasion or holding russias feet to the fire or providing Economic Security support to ukraine as a matter of us policy. All the president asked for is that the president of ukraine do trump a personal political favor by digging up dirt on his adversary by then and ask that he look into bogus allegations alleging that biden did something wrong there is no evidence to that effect but yet he wants that information presumably to try to use it against biden politically and he also asked for even more information that suggest ukraine was involved in meddling in the election its incredible and what is most disturbing in addition to a clear case of the president putting his own personal interest above National Interest is that if you read the whistleblower report not only did the president do this but they try to hide the fact that he did it by storing the transcript of this conversation on a super secret server. Let me explain that. When we have president ial phone calls there are no takers who sit in the situation room usually two or three taking realtime verbatim notes the policy state one other senior representatives of staffers or the expert staff are also in the room taking notes to advise the president if theres anything he needs to react to. None of that seemed to happen in this case there were no takers doing their job and they are stored on a classified secure server that is always the case but now theres a separate server only for the most sensitive highly department to lysed information of the Us Government i myself have never seen that server i have seen reports from it that were hand carried to me and an envelope and then hand carried back thats how sensitive but yet somehow somebody decided this conversation that was not classified now to sit on that server to prevent anybody from having access to that knowledge that is deeply disturbing. Why are there no tape recordings . I dont know the historical reason so when they had nixon and the watergate tapes and all that after that a decision by someone was made to actually record so there are meticulously recorded in realtime by multiple no takers so that the final transcript is the best final take. Who gets these transcripts . Do they go to the state department or Intelligence Community or embassies . How widely are they distributing one distributed . Speaking from my experience i cant speak certainty in the Trump Administration but normally a small group of policies staffers in addition to National Security advisor and the Vice President s office would oversee the transcripts on a need to know basis. Not everybody gets her has access but if you have a policy you need to know if you worked in the European Office or was responsible for ukraine or russia. If you worked in the military Defense Office and needed to know about something related to security then you would receive a transcript so thats a small circle in the first instance. And then cabinet level principal secretary of state secretary of defense cia director, director of National Intelligence et cetera they also in all likelihood would receive a personal copy of the transcript but not widely disseminated. You said a few and there is a sense there was enough people who saw the transcript of that conversation who got the information secondhand but how many people will see something that is considered sensitive . I cannot be certain how they operate but traditionally maybe two or five staffers listening on the call policies staffers plus three or four note takers in the situation room plus or minus on either side and then having immediate access to the call and then maybe the slightly larger circle to receive a transcript of the call once it was produced and that was need to know some are not talking about a lot of people. So on a normal call ten or 15 macs maximum. I dont know the personal circumstances this is such a gravity but to recall where we are this is a case for the president of the United States took the leverage of appropriated congressional funds that congress had approved for a National Security purpose to protect ukraine from russian aggression, 400 million and badly needed assistance the president held up to use as leverage to squeeze a ukrainian president to do him a favor that was purely political in nature. That is very serious im not a lawyer so i will not talk about the legality of it but is deeply concerning raises the prospect we have a president whos not doing the nations business but his own. Administration will come back to say we are interested in eliminating corruption in ukraine. Which is rampant longstanding policy that has concerned a lot of administrations. The administration claims trying to find out if Vice President biden and his son were engaged in some kind of manipulation of reality or fax for financial gain through hunter biden. You were at the white house at the time what is your response . Let me take a few minutes to explain this is completely false there is no basis to the president s claim that joe biden using his office and interactions with ukrainians to benefit his son. Backup. The fact of the matter is every time the Vice President engaged with ukrainians including on issues of corruption it was in support of very transparent clearly defined us policy requested by president obama when Vice President biden was pressing for the removal of the prosecutor general he himself was corrupt and failing to conduct appropriate investigations which wasnt just the United States or the Obama Administration views shared by congress and the imf and europeans to provide economic assistance and widely shared by the European Union all working together with this excessive manifestation of corruption it was an endemic problem so when Vice President biden was making his push to have that prosecutor general removed he did so transparently in support of a defined us policy. Not for personal gain in fact the prosecutor general at the time was investigating the company that hunter biden became a member of. So it was no accident to step off he wasnt investigating hunter biden so a classic case we see so often unfortunately out of this administration to deflect to the American People to create a story that does not exist there was nothing improper that i am aware of and i think history has demonstrated anywhere that Vice President biden did anything improper. He carried out the policies transparently and talked about it publicly and the records of his conversations by phone i can assure you are not hiding on a secret server nobody can access. But hunter biden did profit financially from the ukrainian company. My understanding it was in a Public Domain at the time he became a board member and as a board member he received compensation. So now to your book. A very personal and professional tale so talking about your heritage at the beginning on your mothers side jamaican immigrants and your grandfather was a janitor your grandmother a seamstress and i made but then they put five children who all went to college one son is a doctor, president of university and optometrist. And her mother went to radcliffe it is an extraordinary tale. And on your fathers side descendents of slaves and your father became a renowned economist to the world bank and the federal reserve. So you came from unusual circumstances your life in many ways is the American Dream so your title tough love that reflects in part of all the good things in your life and your extraordinary upbringing but what was the tough love . First of all i am deeply indebted to my family and my parents and both sides of my grandparents on both sides that you describe who really came from nothing and came up with something quite extraordinary to instill education and excellence of service to give back to the community the matter how much or little you give back that was the mantra and the immigrant side of my family as you mentioned jamaican to come to Portland Maine with nothing and managed to send all their kids to college and to see them succeed on my fathers side interestingly not just the descendents of slaves but my greatgrandfather who was a slave fought in the union army during the civil war and after the civil war could go on to achieve a College Education and to start a school in new jersey that lasted 70 years educating generations of africanamericans of manual and technical skill skills, to be employed but also to go to college it was College Prep School as well Education Service and commitment on both sides. But tough love, the title i selected is how i was raised and how i try to raise my kids and serve our country. In the first instance i knew every step of the way my parents loved me fiercely they would give it to me straight they would tell me when i was falling short with no sugar coat would not pump up my ego they taught me i could do whatever i set out to do and if i did my best would be with me no matter what if i didnt do my best but if i was slacking off or not taking my responsibilities seriously they would give me a hard time. Also with my younger brother a very difficult and bitter divorce which included violence in a public custody battle and a very painful challenges for me and my brother from the time i was seven through 15 or 16. Throughout that i knew my parents loved me and my brother very much they were clearly devoted parents in my business they had no business being married and then they split up so that was another tough experience and we had no choice but to decide we would persevere and get back up despite being knocked down by that experience giving up was in our culture so that was another aspect of tough love. With my own kids i have a 22 yearold son and his 16 yearold daughter they cannot be more different from one another but they know that when mom is around they will get the fierce committed love that also get it straight there is no getting away with murder in our house. So what struck me as you are as tall as i am i am 5foot 1 inches and you are 5foot 3 inches you played point guard. Really . Point guard is often the shortest person on the team. There are exceptions now. [laughter] but typically get somebody who handles the ball and sets up the plays and passes but most of the time they are the playmaker so i must say that i was rather mediocre as a player. But then you bring the point guard back so explain how that team to be. Your secret service call signing. But also your philosophy of what you were doing for something that resonated. So a role that is analogous to National Security the National Security advisor isnt the person who takes the glory shots or the star player getting on the media. The point guard is the person who is behind the scenes more often helping to lead a team to produce as a whole. Passing the ball off to the star players mother secretary of state or secretary of defense. There is a public impression to negotiate the deal and to do the public signing and whatever it is. But the National Security advisor is behind the scenes at the cabinet level to make recommendations to the president of how to proceed on the toughest issues. So i drew that analogy because it is apt its Important Role but not the glory position. Looking to those various positions in the first one at the National Security council under president clinton you have the crisis of somalia and black hawk down which became a movie in 1983 and then the crisis nearby in rwanda were 800,000 people were killed in a country the size of vermont which is staggering. So first of all what you learned about dealing with crisis and issues of when you engage in what circumstance when there is the slaughter of humankind and clinton in the end said this was his greatest regret. The context is i was 28 years old my first job in government to. My title was director for International Organizations of peacekeeping i was on the nsc staff i got oversight into issues in africa and asia and europe so in addition to somalia and rwanda going on we were also dealing with bosnia and haiti and cambodia a host of major challenges that the United Nations and peacekeepers were involved. Somalia and rwanda was an informative crisis in my professional development in somalia block black hawk down was the culmination of the administrations decision to go after the warlords who had killed the somali civilians and prevented us from complete a position of humanitarian assistance to those who were starving president bush brought us into that and clinton carried on. After that tragic shootdown of the helicopters and the loss of those serviceman and being dragged through the streets congress reacted very swiftly to put enormous pressure on the president to end somalia actually prematurely before it was responsible to do so. So what i learned first of all is the decisionmaking process from the Principals Committee needs to be more handson to have more Service Members deployed and you cannot lead that to lowerlevel deputies for an interagency process and that was a challenge the other thing i learned is rules of engagement of president bush made the decision to go into somalia for all the right reasons we have to be mindful going into a complex society where you may or may not be welcomed and there are political dynamics we may not fully understand and is very hard to separate humanitarian mission from the immigration building challenge so that is us underestimating the complexity and the risk. Rwanda the actual start of the genocide happened after the last american servicemembers were required. The last thing on anybodys mind in washington or in congress was that the United States ought to send forces back to Central Africa to a country they had not heard of at the time. But what i learned from rwanda that i saw firsthand with the National Security advisor at the time and just saw church yards filled with dead bodies decomposing one of the most experiences that i have ever had but what i learned is what happens when you dont make timely decisions whether or not to intervene. Im not sure the American Intervention in rwanda could have been positive because these killings were going door to door with machetes and we just learned in somalia that the best fighting force in the world could be challenged by warlords writing on top of vehicles with machine guns. But in the case of rwanda there was never the question called the decision was never discussed as to whether or not the United States should intervene or support others to intervene. It was a series of individual decisions that we had to get the americans out we should question if it is called genocide. Were if they shut down hate radio so those Big Decisions should the us handle it alone or with others intervening . That was a failure of the decisionmaking process so i learned you have to be engaged and handson with a conscious yes or no decision or that will slip away from you and president clinton regrets and he express them public many times that he did not intervene that if we would have sent 10000 troops it might have been different im not sure i am as confident in that is he is but i do think what we should have learned from that experience that we have to have a handson active process. [inaudible conversations] good evening everyone