Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Presidency 20140825

Weekend, on cspan 3. To join the conversation, like us on facebook at cspan history. Next on the president s how do make decisions, whether it is firing cabinet officials or going to war . We will hear from advisers to president s Ronald Reagan, bill clinton, george w. Bush, and barack obama. Former secretary of defense leon panetta moderated the discussion. Thank you. [applause] thank you very much, and i welcome all of you to the final forum of our lecture series this year. I think, as you all know, we are looking at 100 years since world war i, 2014 to 1914, an awful lot of history. The changes that have been made, we have looked at war and peace and the changes in that arena. We have looked at the role of government, and we have also looked at the issue of freedom versus security. To take ae are going look at the president of the United States and how president s make decisions, and residents, frankly, influence all of those other areas that we just talked about. The president of the United States has today assumed andedible responsibilities facing incredible pressures in that position. Since 1914, we have had 17 president s of the United States, all of whom, you know, will have various places in history. We have gone from willison to harding, truman to eisenhower and nixon, kennedy to carter and reagan, johnson to clinton, bush, and obama. What can we learn from all of hase president s . And how the presidency changed in terms of the responsibilities that have to be confronted . We will look at the challenges throughodern presidency the eyes of a for you our top aides, all of whom have served president s of the United States, through the eyes of four top aides, all of whom who have served president s of the United States, and we are looking at president s that each of these individuals served. What was their greatest strength, and what was their greatest weakness . And how do you think history is going to look at them . Were talking about president reagan, president clinton, president bush, and president obama. Thank you very much. And sylvia toon put together an alphabet panel. [laughter] axelrod, a, etc. It is an absolute thrill and a joy to be here in monterey and with leon and sylvia and with all of you. Ronald reagans greatest strength. He knew why he ran for the presidency, and he knew what he would do once he was president. He would focus the country and on the United States rebuilding its economy and creating respect for america around the world. Cutting the rate of spending increase, cutting taxes, rebuilding our National Security, building up, and finding over burdensome regulations to eliminate. Ed all eightcus years to those priorities. He was able to put in practice, along with the private sector, obviously, 18 million new jobs in an economy that he inherited that with double digit inflation, double digit interest , and america was, as jimmy carter said, suffering malaise. At the end of the carter administration, most people suggested that the presidency might be too big in this modern era for any one person. They stopped saying that with and for all of the president s who served thereafter. Ronald reagan also understood that he was elected not just to make statements but, in fact, to govern and get things done. He knew that in order to forge consensus in washington, he needed to build consensus throughout america, and that would put pressure on washington. Understood the governing. Well, let me put it this way. Tip oneill, the venerable speaker of the house, used to say, i dont like compromising with Ronald Reagan, because every time i compromise with him, reagan gets 80 of what he wants. [laughter] and Ronald Reagan would say to us, well, ill take 80 any time and come back the next year for the additional 20 . Governing. That was a hallmark. All right, what was his weakness . His weakness was he had a tendency to trust everybody, and but why nancy and i he trusted everyone until proven and sometimes things just did not add up president clinton . Only one reason that leon asked me to come out here. He called me up, and he said, we are having this panel, and i want you to talk about bill clinton, and i said, but, leon, you know everything about bill clinton. And he said, that is why i want you to talk, so you will get the phone calls. I love leon panetta. You guys are lucky to have him. [applause] know, anything i say, you can blame it on him, because he taught me it all. Greatest strength. Clintonsesident greatest strength was his intellectual curiosity. And his absolute ability to do the homework it takes to understand a problem from all angles and his willingness to accept advice from people of all walks of life. Theknow, we could walk into oval office and give them a piece of advice, and we could say red, yellow, and green, and he would see orange, and then he would say wow. He could take a problem of no matter what magnitude, and he could distill it down into some facts that he could communicate it so that anybody could understand it, and that is a unique skill. We could have nobel scientists in any subject coming in two weeks from now, and we could not get him to hit a lick at a snake for the first 13 days. We would not do anything, but on would seeday, you books from the White House Library stacked up this high on thatesk, and he reads like old evelyn woods reading course. I do not know how many of you remember that, but so quick that you cannot believe he can retain it, and then he would call people on the periphery of the , and you would look at his phone logs that night, and he will have talked with people you just couldnt believe. [laughter] but people would come in for the first 45 minutes, he just listened to them, but the last 15 minutes, he would Say Something so profound that it would make you so proud that you could not stand it, and it was that intellectual curiosity and willingness to do his homework and to listen to people on all sides of the subject before he made a decision. And the weakness . [laughter] a oneword answer. Yes. History speaks to that. Andy, president bush . First president bush was a man of conviction. He was very grounded. He was also very deliberate and disciplined. Very courageous, and he had the courage to make a decision, and i would say his flaws were that he allow there to be a myth that he could not read when he was a very well read and took time to read while he was president , and it was usually relevant to the responsibilities he had, but he also kind of prefer to be from west texas when he really was well educated at yale, and so he allow there to be a perception that he was not as engaged as he was, in fact, but i think the great strength and notent to make a decision, to allow politics to drive a decision, but to allow conscience, character, and what he thought was right for the country to give definition to the decisions he had to make, and they were impossibly difficult decisions. First of all, let me say a word about leon, as well, because i had the opportunity to serve with him, and he is really the embodiment of public service, so he is the perfect guy to be running and if you like this. Director,n, budget cia director, chief of staff, secretary of the defense, and it makes you wonder, why cant you hold a job . [laughter] at them a director university of chicago department, and it is very much the same, our goals, which is to try to inspire young men and public service, and you are a great exemplar for that, so thank you for that. [applause] are an awfulere lot of young servicemen and women in the audience tonight, and i want to thank you, as well, again as you inspire us. [applause] talk, histo erskine intellectual curiosity was very familiar to me, because i have that same feeling about president obama. I have never sat in a meeting where i felt that he was overmatched or unprepared, and he was as stimulated by the whole array of issues that come before a president as anybody i could imagine, but i would say i was going to say that his strengths were that he is incredibly bright, thoughtful, and makesrative deliberative decisions, but i really think given the history of the moment in which he has served, the quality that i most admire about him was that he was willing and has been willing to make decisions that are in the best interest of the country, despite very, very negative politics at a time when we absolutely had to make those decisions, and i think the American People tend to find leaders at the right times to make those kinds of decisions, and he made those, and we went through some terrible crises, and i always felt good to be at his side, because i felt he would get to the right answer regardless of the politics, and i was mostly the guy telling in the politics, and i was almost always ignored, and i admire him for that. I likedarlier what about him best was that he listened to me so little, but i stringsthat everyones is also often their weakness, and so i think that the criticism of the president is the same, that he is deliberative, that he is notghtful, that he is spontaneous enough in his decisionmaking. I think it is a good tradeoff, but i would say that that is the criticism you most often here. You have all mentioned crises, and in many ways, a president is really tested by crisis, and what i would like to do is have you reflect on what was the worst crisis that you saw a president have to handle during the time that you were there, and how did he handle it . How will history speak to that . Kine, lets start with you. I think i will go international. [laughter] you know, i do not know how many of you can think that, but this was before Osama Bin Laden was wellknown, in this country, toleast, and we had a chance get him in afghanistan once, but to do that, we had to launch missiles and send them over pakistan, with whom we had a andy relationship, at rest, since there was that shaky relationship at best, and since there was a shaky relationship, we did not want to alert them to your early so that the information we had would leak out, so we sent the vice at rumble vice admiral at the air force academy to have dinner with the president of pakistan, and he told him exactly three seconds before the missiles crossed pakistan, and when those missiles landed, we missed osama minutes, i literally and the reason i always looked at that as a decision that took thatreal guts is we knew the chances were 50 50 that we would get him. Two, we ran a real chance of disrupting the relationships with a very important country that we were having to deal with, and three, this was during monica crisis, and we also knew that if we were that the Republican House and senate would accuse us of trying to divert peoples attention, and as you know, there was a movie out there dog, and hehe never hesitated a second. Glad we were able to finish the job. [laughter] [applause] andy . Crisis. , a president ll comes to office focused on what they talked about as they were campaigning to be president , and then reality sets in when they take the oath of office, and the truth is, when they take the oath of office, they probably think more about their inaugural address than the oath they took, but after the address is over, then the burdens of the job dark and president bush had significant burdens that showed up. The chinese forcing a plane down , and how was he going to react . What was going to happen . And president bush had significant burdens that showed up. Not a crisis. But it could have been. He was restrained and was seeking counsel and making phone calls, and the chinese were very slow to answer him, but then you have other crises that come i do not want to say you never anticipate them. They are usually storms, and probably the greatest crisis that caused the greatest concern for the president was hurricane katrina, and the frustration with that crisis was the president alone does not dictate the response, and there are laws that the federal Emergency Management agency must find a request from a governor to offer support, and that request has to follow a specific protocol that congress outlines, and we had a hard time getting one governor to make the right response or their right question or ask for the right information, and yet the public only sees the president s response. Do not appreciate the governors response, so that was frustrating. Probably the greatest crisis that any president faces, and i pray that president dont have to face this crisis, but too many do, how do you meet your Constitutional Responsibilities on a policy you did not invite, but it reads wires the president to keep that oath that he cannot keep without the fine men and women who take other oath to keep his oath and call them into service . And that is going to war, and any time a young man or a young woman is put into harms way, and they are invited to make sacrifices that the president would never invite on anyone, it is a burden the president takes, and going to war is always a crisis. Heavily on the president , and i watched it weigh very heavily on president george w. Bush, and i watched it weigh heavily on his dad, as well, so i would say that is the crisis, one that the law does not allow you to respond the way you would like to, a hurricane, and another one is the constitution says you have the sole responsibility to respond, but you cannot do it yourself, you have to count on other people to make sacrifices, and that word and ends up being the burden. Well, since bin laden is that word and ends up being the burden. Well, since bin laden is the truth is, for better or worse, there are a lot of crises to choose from under this presidency, and it is not over yet, but on december 16, 2008, we got together with the president elect and the Vice President elect, just a few weeks after we celebrated in grant park for the first time with his Economic Team together, and they gave us a briefing on the state of the economy, and christina romer, who was going to be with the council of economic advisers, spoke first. She was an expert on the great depression, and she went through all of her charts, and at the end, she said, mr. President , i think were in the midst of a recession that is going to be like anything we have seen not going to be like anything we have seen since the great depression, and they talked trillion, millions of jobs lost, and Timothy Geithner spoke, the treasury secretary incoming, and he said that Banking System is locked up, and it could collapse. No loans are being given, and then peter or zach, the incoming budget director said, peter the incoming budget director, said this will add to so at this point in time, the president entertained them and dismissed a recount. [laughter] and we basically became a triage unit trying to right the economy, and it shrunk by 8. 9 , and we were losing 800,000 jobs per month. The stock market was heading to millions of had foreclosures, and it was the worst situation any president in faced since roosevelt 1933, and what followed was a recovery act, a large Spending Program at a time when people were concerned about deficits but necessary to plug the hole in the economy. We had to take steps to stand up to the financial industry, which was reviled at the time for the role it played were perceived to have played in the financial crisis and the train wreck of , and the u. S. Auto industry was on the brink, and chrysler and gm were weeks away so you atuptcy, and all of those things, and we had to step in and save them, and none of these steps were positive. They were all difficult, but it is what his responsibility required, and he took them, and he took them with eyes open, knowing that the politics was bad, and he never asked about the politics or allowed us to put the politics on him, because this is what he was elected to do. President Ronald Reagan. Reagan became beloved during the campaign in 1980, i think the country really fell in love with him when they saw the grace and dignity and humor after the assassination attempt, which is clearly a major first crisis for the administration. Reagan forget president as he was being wheeled in on the gurney to gw hospital saying, i hope all of you doctors are republicans. [laughter] of the story is that the surgeon leaned down and said, today, we are all republicans, or what he said to forgot toney, if duck. We lostcrisis is when the challenger, and Ronald Reagan became the chaplain to the country in that address, comforting america on the loss of those wonderful astronauts, and then there was where Ronald Reagan was accused of walking away from a deal, a strategic arms negotiation, with Mikael Gorbachev because he would have to sacrifices sdi, strategic defense initiative, which he thought would keep more pressure on the soviet union. He was criticized, but ultimately, it got gorbachev back to the table. The next one that i want to Everybody Knows the signature line of the reagan years. His visit to the berlin wall. But let me suggest to you that it wasnt that easy. The state department and the National Security folks all opposed that one paragraph in that speech, because they thought it would undercut gorbachevs efforts with peers toward the and glass noticed glasnost, and he asked me, and i said you are president. You get to decide. And then he said, i think we will leave it in, and i explained the objections of the others, and Ronald Reagan said, no, this will help and put him even more strongly towards bargaining and negotiating. We went to berlin. The night before, there had been massive riot against the United States because we had put pershing two missiles in germany and elsewhere. George shultz called me on the phone and said, will you tell that i share my departments objection to that speech, to the paragraph in that speech, and i hope you will convey my views to the president , and as everyone on this panel knows, when a cabinet secretary does not ask for 10 minutes of the president calendar but asked you to convey the information, it means i have covered myself with the bureaucracy. [laughter] if the line fails, and it is a major road crises, it is on your shoulder. We have all had that. President reagan and i were driving to the Brandenburg Gate in the president ial motorcade. He was reviewing his speech one more time, and he got to that paragraph, and he turned to me , it is going to drive the state Department Boys crazy, but i am going to leave it in. Mr gorbachev, tear down this wall. Ronald reagan basically ended the cold war and brought gorbachev to the table so we got a negotiation. [applause] since i was a chief of staff, i will give you a small element. I just got appointed chief of staff, and i was at home, and i think this is about 2 00, 2 30 in the morning, and i got a call from the secret service, and the secret service said, mr. Panetta you know when you get a call at that time of the evening, it is not good news, so, mr. Panetta, i hate to tell you, but a plane just went into the white house. And i said, what was it . Was it a 747 . Said, no, it was a light plane, and i think it may have damaged the Jackson Magnolia tree, and i said, wait a minute. This could be a terrorist attack on the president. Were there explosives in the plane . Answer was, well, according to cnn news [laughter] i said, no, i would appreciated it if you would go out there and get off of your but and check it out. If it makes you feel good, there is a great story that colin powell tells, being at a church with the National Security advisor, and an aide the service, this ceremony, and says, there is an urgent phone call for you, and, boy, everybodys eyes follow the National Security Council Director as he leaves the church, and he comes back 10 and alma powel says, what is going on, and he says tom oh, there has been a in a latin american says, oh, i she heard that on cnn already. And he says, there has been a coup in a latin american country. Pirates,g a lot about that was something that came up later, and all of the sudden, you know, the president has 10 minutes to decide whether or not he should give the order to try to take out captain phillips captors, and he had snipers bobbing on a boat, and thought pretty sure they could get them, but they could have gotten captain phillips, or like when youre dealing with a financial and they tellr, you we might have been h1n1 that is the nature of the presidency, and that is why it is such an incredibly challenging job. Let me ask you about that. What is the process the president uses to come to a decision . We have heard a little of it discussed here, but president s issues,face down list on legislative issues, as commander in chief on foreign policy, political decisions, etc. , etc. What is the process that the president uses in order to come to a decision . The perceptions are these. Reagan kind of had this belief that was talked about, and clinton reached out to review, and bush we got operated by his gut or a law professors approach from obama. What was the process you saw the president use . First, i want to say it is up to the chief of staff to know the president s personality, light of what their thinking process is, and you want to make sure, in my opinion, i wanted to make sure the president was never making a decision when he was hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. [laughter] and since that is 24 hours a day, that is a burden. I also wanted him to make a decision in the best possible movie could be in. I did not want a pessimistic president making a decision. I wanted to be an optimistic decision. So i focused on the present lifestyle, and that is a 24 7 item. I did focus on every minute of every day, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and try to make sure the president could be as prepared as possible when we did not know what he had to be prepared to do. The president y, would try not to allow emotion to drive the response. He would seek counsel that was not monolithic, so i would make sure he was not getting monolithic council. He was getting information to be able to make a decision rather decision,esented a and i wanted to make sure he understood when the decision was necessary, whether it was in 10 minutes or two hours or six days or three months, and to give the president opportunity then to adjust the process he had to go through to make a decision in time, because if you make the decision till late, it is irrelevant. If you make it to your early, it may not be mature at the time it is put in. So it is like goldilocks and the three bears, always looking for to feedect porridge him, but i think ultimately, the president had to be comforted that he had the information, the best Information Available at the time from people he could trust, who were not just feeding him a response, and he had to understand the constraints that were there. Consequences of the decision being made to our early or too late, and what are the consequences for the decision if it is wrong, so that is the process that i would go through, what probably whispering into the president here on 9 11 is the best example of delivering messages that the president and expect to hear. When i told him a second plane hit the second tower, america was under attack, it was not a statement he expected to hear from his chief of staff, sitting in front of second grade students with an audience of a press pool watching every move, and i couldnt present in the information and asks to have a discussion or enter into a , so i had to give him the message and back off and let trywrestle with it, but i to give him all of the tools in the other room, where the staff was getting ready to help the president do his job. Erskine . People asked me all of the time, was this tv show the west wing accurate . It does a good job capturing the velocity, and it is faster than the. Com world, and the issues you have to deal with, and an average day for leon, whether we do with bosnia, new orleans northern ireland, taxes, and then we would have lunch. [laughter] always did, thank god it is friday, only two more workdays until monday. [laughter] and if you were doing one of these sunday shows, all of a sudden on saturday, what you did then you had to do on sunday, so it really was a seven day a week job, but i think what this guy was a greatcame in job. Leon came in and brought in two arrived, and when we we saw a white house where every 15 minutes of every day was casual. You can imagine in a world that is changing and evolving as much as the one these guys describe. Clearly, if you have every 15 minutes scheduled, it gives you no time to think, reflect, and react to a changing world, and it also means that you are going to appear to be late to meeting after meeting after meeting, when it is really work. The second thing that leon and i saw was that we had some members of the staff, and i know this will come as a great surprise to you guys, who leads what was in various meetings, meetings they were not even in, and one of the issues of that was to lock the president into where they wanted him to go as opposed to where he might want to go, and therefore if he actually made the opposite decision, it would look like he flipflopped, and finally, we found a white house where people would wander into the oval office, and the president would get a Little Information here, a Little Information there, and it would take them longer to make worse decisions, and so leon changed that. He made sure the president got all of his information into he freed upand three to four hours every single day to think or reflect on the changing world, and we made sure in theory that less is often better than more, that instead of doing two to three events a day and therefore stepping on the message he was trying to get out, that he would do maybe two a week, and if he was saying something in new york that was quite important, but instead of having bob rice and bob rubin saying the exact opposite thing, they all said the same thing, and that way we were able to get control. We were able to establish organizationale structure and focus, and the president went on to have a successful second year. N reminds me of west wi ng, and i had the pleasure of being a consultant for the storyline for three years. The first time i went out to hollywood, i met with seven riders, none of whom was more than 35 years of age. The seven hadf ever been in washington, and i spent several hours as we started to chart out the year, and at the end, i said i had to , and isto washington wonderful, very pretty, young rider, woman, got up and gave me a hug, and one of the male writers said, you are making me said, do you know how envious you are making me . She has never kissed air publican in her life. [laughter] everybody walks into the oval office, almost everyone, and gets caught in cotton in mouth, telling the president what he wants to know. Our job was to be the reality therapist, saying, it doesnt add up. Everybody walks into the oval office, almost everybody, and says, you know, mr. President , it is in your best interest to tothis, and our job was figure out why it was in their best interest first, and the president s second. Ronald reagan was a voracious reader. He read all of the memos. Decision memos we all talked about. Wasthe key to reagan listening to the arguments in. Erson as an actor, he looked at peoples eyes and heard their tone, and he could start sorting , and he really added up never liked the argument, mr. President , this is the best politics for you. He would end the conversation. The answer was make sure at our level that he had the right options and let them argue it with the global office, and then later he would make a decision. David . Well, i think, and some of it has to do with the input, right . So there is so much information, and part of the staff job is to filter the information but filter it fairly so he gets a feel for the sweep of arguments, and obama, one of the things that has been very good for him in the presidency is that he had been a legislature legislator for 11 years before he became president , so he was either in springfield or washington. This was the first time in his life he was actually living with his family on a regular basis, so he would go home every night at 6 30 and have dinner with his family, and then he would die , well intok folder the night, reviewing all of the things for the next day, and he was always well briefed on what was in that package. Suggested, and, leon, youre asking a question you know the answer to, because you were involved in a lot of this, and this is in a sense that he drew out thrills down. He was very well aware of the implications of the decisions, and he wanted to have people argue them out, and as you know, whoever was in the room, he presumed they were there for a reason, and he wanted to know what everybody thought. He did not want just one dominant voice voice to speak. And then youd make a decision. Asked for my own insights, when we were looking and itbin laden decision was considered a pretty risky operation. And others said this was 20 risky and that we should not do it. Was steel oh risky. Ky. Too ris decision,cing a tough ask a citizen, what would you do if you knew what i did, and i thought if i told the average citizen that we had the best intelligence and location of laden,ve in of bin then i think they would say you could not make the mistake of taking this on, and i told the president does, and i also said i had tremendous confidence in the ability of the seals, and the president did not make a decision then, but the next day, he called, and he said, it is a go. Let me ask. You are all members of president s who were elected to a second term, and a second term, frankly, turns out to be pretty rough. It is a bumpy ride. Things catch up to you. You know, in the last four years , that you did not have to worry about in the first of four your years. For reagan, irancontra, for clinton, lewinsky, bush, katrina, obama, veterans care, etc. How does a president stay relevant in the second term . And not seem like, you know, things are not going to happen without the president erecting policy . Directing policy . How does the president stay relevant . First of all, let me say that i think the president today has an even more difficult task because of the pace at which the media churns, and it is so easy to be overexposed because of the way the media churns, and people get tired. We live in a society where people are always looking for the new, and they get tired, and in six years, you have to deal with that element, and then we have a few polarizations at we have today, and so it is , forcult for any president this president , but on the question of relevance, i think this is a serendipitous thing to talk about. The president signed an order on e missions from a coalfired plant, and that is pretty profound in its implications, and i am sure it will be pretty controversial, as well, but no one can argue that it was not a meaningful act or gesture. It was a very important one, and i think it will go down in sort of the annals of this discussion as we step forward. I think you have to use the tools that are available to you to advance the things that you feel are important, but the other element, by the way, and this is a failing of our political system, we now have a permanent election campaign. Within a fewions weeks of governing as an interlude, and then more elections, and so part of what happens is people get bored, because this president is not going to be running anymore, so they are already thinking about, and you may have something about it, what about the next president ial election . This guy is the next big news, so that is something else, you know, in this environment in which we are constantly churning. It makes it hard for a secondterm president. Is always ad term challenge. George w. Bush had a challenge of trying to get some of his favorite programs past. For Social Security reform, and there was immigration reform, and he was not able to build momentum. Obviously, he was dealing with two wars, and he was trying to manage this. We were trying to win the peace, so those were challenges, but then you had the crisis in our economy that hit after the republican and democratic conventions, after the two nominees of the major parties had already been selected, and we had an economic crisis, and he had to deal with that, so he did not have a lot of positive momentum going to get anything done with congress, or to mobilize support with the American People. He was trying to clean up two in twoelp secure peace places that did not want to embrace peace, and then he had an economic crisis that very few people anticipated would calm. So i think what he did do was manage with a calm deliverance, and he was a partner in a transition. And, yes, president george w. Bush and barack obama had very different philosophies, andously different parties, he was not given an empty basket to play with. So he focused on the transition. And he started to do that quite early, and it was probably the most orderly transition. I will always be profoundly and they were briefing us in terms of their jobs and bring us uptodate on things that were relevant for us moving forward, so i was proud. Proud of our country because of the way that transition was handled, because frankly, we had been the jesus out of them in our campaign. We were very critical of the and it said something about our country that despite now, we did Work Together on something important. You mentioned the financial crisis. After Lehman Brothers collapsed, hank paulson, the treasury secretary, reached out to brief asma, and obama was supportive as he could be in terms of rallying them together and i am goingon to break all of this comedy with a tease and make one partisan point, which is democrats, in large numbers, came to the support of president bush, and it was a very tough vote. It was a time of crisis for the country, and i think that was a good example that is worth following. My transition is that the second term is about getting ready to pass the baton, and a good president will make sure the baton is not dropped the day it is past, not being a lame duck president , getting ready to support a president you may not like what you will respect. You stay relevant . You govern as if it was your first day in office, not your last day in office. Had the major hurdle of that, wera, but before also had tax reform with marty , and one of the most fundamental tax bill is in american history, and it took place in the second term. Reform. Mmigration so did welfare reform, Social Security, and Social Security reform all were the first 2. 5 years of the second term. But after irancontra, and the don regan, hed did it because he needed new thed and fresh ideas, and credibility of colin powell and baker and myself, not just at couldrs, but somebody who figure out a strategy who could make those last years important. When i came back to the white house, it was that Ronald Reagan was not a lame duck. He was a dead duck. Why . Because he had just lost the United States senate for the last years of his term. Ronald reagan went out of his so to rebuild the presidency tradee did the u. S. Free agreement. In hindsight, it looks easy, except jim baker, my wonderful predecessor and secretary of the treasury, could not push it over the line. It took the president to do it. Ae president had built up trusting relationship with the congress on both sides of the aisle, so he was able to recreate the coalition. He did the strategic arms withiation with gorbachev the two summit meetings and the treaty. We got a sick cream court a , anthonyourt nominee kennedy, approved overwhelmingly by a democratic senate, and i know this is going to sound weird, but we had all 13 appropriation bills passed on time. Actor. For a bmovie [laughter] [applause] erskin, you were there. We balanced the budget. [laughter] [applause] it is true. And to get that done, i had to spend months and months in Conference Rooms with newt gingrich, and you all only a lot for that. [laughter] but president clinton loved being president. He delighted in it. Day toed to use every make this country a better to work andace raise your family. Let me give you an example of something that shows his humanity. Almost every day, he would, over from the east wing to the west wing, and he would have articles that had been in various newspapers from around the country, little teeny papers, that he ripped out, and it had been somebody who had gotten some kind of bad deal, and he would give the articles to me and say, erskin, go fix this. Would neverople know that the president of the United States did things to make it better. I think he had a successful second term, in spite of the fact that we were going through people say it is so partisan , but we were able to work because republicans they knew what they wanted to accomplish. We it was not the day that balanced the budget, but how we balanced the budget. An armored telling him, mr. President , we have got a deal, and in that deal, we have got Health Care Insurance for 5 million poor kids, and that was the happiest i have ever seen him. We are going to go to questions from the audience, but before i get there, let me just ask this question. We all know that the presidency is a very isolated job. President s get elected. They suddenly go to the white house, secret service is all around them. And they are basically in some ways trapped in the office result, it is a really tough, not only to try to stay in touch, but to protect your humanity. Just give me the shortest answer to how didh regards the president protect the human in aof that individual situation where there is all of this isolation and pressure on the job . You would get a kick out of fact that Ronald Reagan loved to call congressman and senators, but not in washington. The white house switchboard would connect the congressman or senator back in the district, so everybody in washington, oh, the white house is on the phone, but you call the district, and it is a big deal. Reagan would insist on talking to the receptionist first. What is going on in your town . What is happening . I notice president reagan, but tell me. Get the congressman on the phone. What do you hear in your town hall meeting . What did you hear when you were walking the streets . What do i need to know . All of a sudden, there was chatter all over. The president of the United States called congressman panetta, congressman russo. What did you tell him . You told him you are going to support him, did you . Nt you . Nd do [laughter] that is how you start getting consensus in the hometown. That is how we started gaining ground from the rankandfile. Home to my original birthplace, brooklyn, new york. I used to sit at a luncheon counter. People knew me when i was 18 years old. Hearing . You . Hat is going on what is going on in washington . Im sitting here in a baseball cap. People open up to you, and i would share it with the president. Erskine . I think i gave one good example. We did everything we could to keep the president in touch with everyday folks. We never had a problem with him wanting to hear people from different walks of life. He wanted your opinion. He wanted to know what you really felt. But as i think ken said a few alltes ago, when any of you walk into the oval office, you might have spent 20 minutes with leon and me first. We might say when you go in there, tell them exactly what you told us, ok . Then you walk in the oval office and the president says, how am i doing . [laughter] president. Mr. You are the best. [laughter] it is hard. [laughter] we tried everything. We tried pulling people off the rope line going through the white house to come meet the president. It worked out well. [laughter] really good. [laughter] that was one of my best ideas. [laughter] lets move on. [laughter] i try to make sure the president boys had time with his wife and time to Pay Attention to his daughters. Schedule time for the president to spend time with. His daughters or his wife. They did not schedule time for him to talk to a friend, see a movie, or read a book. I try to make sure the president had time to see friends that were not part of the political community. Yes, he had friends in congress, and yes, that was a little bit like work. But i wanted him to have time to talk to people that were not carrying the burdens of the office door were carrying the concerns of the nation. We tried to do that. He enjoyed going away to camp davis camp david. He greatly enjoyed going to his ranch. Being with friends who were not using him so he could befriend them. That is a hard thing to schedule because time is short. Decisions are important, and the policy concerns are great. But i tried to focus on allowing the president to interact with thate that had concerns were not nationally driven concerns. Instead, they were personally driven interests in a great country. First of all, i mentioned family was very important to him. You kept him very much grounded. In the same vein, his old , some frenzy grew up with would come periodically. He was very close. In terms of keeping in touch with the country, the president said i want 10 letters a night representative of the letters we are getting. Sometimes he would write handwritten notes could sometimes he would call. He would respond to all of these letters. More importantly, he would circulate these around the white house. We were in a discussion on the economic crisis, and he was told Small Business lending was moving forward at pace. He had four letters from people who could not get any credit. He would have those checked out. He would come back with these stories. So these letters became very important to him, and also very difficult for him because they were heartbreaking. Some of them were heartbreaking about people struggling. He would cite them often. In private conversations, he would talk to me about them. I think traveling and interacting with people was really important. I went in the summer of 2009 we are takingo say on water with this healthcare thing. [laughter] this was not news to him, by the way. He said i know youre right, but i just got back from green bay, wisconsin. I met a woman, 36 years old, two children, she had insurance, but she also had stage four breast cancer. She hit her lifetime cap and is worried about dying and leaving her family bankrupt. Small hisd the hand in the small of my back easing out of the office. He said lets keep fighting for the country would believe in. I think Human Interaction is very important. Absolutely. Let me take a quick break to recognize our question review team who are the people responsible for selecting the questions i will present to our speakers. I would ask you to hold your applause until introduce the entire group. Judy copeland, married to wan duwant, doug mcknight, mitchell. R, and jeff if you would all thank them, please. [applause] there was some comment about some of the students in the audience. They are military. We were able to host them in terms of talking about some of the issues we talked about. Let me introduce first of all , let me have them all stand, if i could. [applause] let me personally thank you for your service to this country. We deeply appreciate it. Their students from the Defense Language Institute and the Navy Postgraduate school. Thank you. You may be seated. Lastly, if i could mention that throughout our lecture series, obviously student participation in these events is possible only because of the generous support of our lecture series sponsors. Sylvia and i along with the board of directors are very grateful for the sponsorship. We get students from high schools, colleges, universities, military institutions throughout Northern California to be able to participate and learn about political issues facing this country. I would appreciate it if you would give our sponsors a hand as well. [applause] let me turn to some of the questions from our audience if i could. About one of the more recent conflicts we have just seen in washington with secretary shinseki and the veterans administration. Secretary shinseki and the veterans administration, obviously there was a scandal at the veterans administration. It seemed to take weeks for the president and secretary to act. Shouldnt he have been fired earlier . David . Why me . [laughter] i did not apply for the panel that screened the questions. I want to hear the questions first. [laughter] the gods honest truth is if youre talking about pure politics, it probably would have made sense because theres nothing that washington loves or demands more than a body to be thrown out whenever there is a problem. The fact is general since lucky general shinseki has done many things well. He administered the post9 11 g. I. Bill and had taken 2 million more veterans new policies related to agent orange and pink estate ptsd. He had done a lot of things well. It is the president s habit and practice not to throw bodies out just because there is bloodlust in washington. As a matter of pure politics, the play would have been to fire someone quickly. But the decent and honorable thing was to really look at the facts and see what was known, what was not known, what was done, and what was not done. That is what he did. The Tipping Point came, and i agree with what david said, the Tipping Point came not when so many republicans came out with the resignation of shinseki. But when the democrats in very contested senate seats and former will House Democrats started lining up to oppose shinseki, that is the tipping scale. I did not say bloodlust was a partisan pursuit. [laughter] all of washington engages in it. Let me ask you this. Did reagan like to fire people . Hated it. Showed loyalty to his cabinet, white house staff. When confronted with it, eventually it was the job of the chief of staff to say, time to go. [laughter] whether that was all he north poindexter,or john he did have to fire, as well as occasional cabinet officers. But he held out and a sense of loyalty and the importance of making sure they could make right before he let them go. Erskine, bill clinton . I learned something about our ticks from al simpson i learned something about politics from al simpson. [laughter] i love al. A. Described politics to me saying it comes from the greek poli meaning many and ticks meaning bloodsucking insects. [laughter] mike spears is most politicians got to where they are by saying yes and not by saying no. So i always felt it was my responsibility that if Something Like this had to be done, i would take care of it, that i would be the guy that said no or to let somebody go. That is the way we did it. It also means you have the responsibility when dealing with the president and it is just the two of you in the room, you cannot be afraid of losing her job. You have to stand up and say i do not think this is the right way for us to go. President s do not like to fire anybody. Sometimes they have to and they come to recognize it. Is a patrioteki and did a great job in service to our country. He did a lot at veterans administration. He did an outstanding job for much of what he did. However, he ended up personifying the problem. Once you start personifying the problem, thomas does not see the Solution Congress does not see the solution. I think it was the right thing for him to tender his resignation. I dont know whether president obama asked for it or not, but im going to say he tendered his resignation. Since all of us who served served at the president pleasure of the president for the time being, that is what the document says that hangs on our wall, and it is redundant in its insecurity. [laughter] shinsekisretary time arrived. I dont know if the pleasure was gone. But the time being arrived wear was appropriate for him to leave. No president likes to say goodbye to a staffer. I have watched president s hold onto people they should not have held onto very long but did. And others who agonized over the goodbye longer than they should have. I would only add that even though erskine is an aberration, every chiefight, of staff started out to be his height and now we are all 59. [laughter] we talked about two terms for the president. Should the president s term be changed to a single sixyear term . Andy . I dont think it should be because then it would make the president a lame duck on year one of a sixyear term. [laughter] congress would not pay as much attention as they should. Watched the president s authority wane as his Political Support wanes. People would already start to be looking at who the next president would be. No, i do not support a sixyear term. I think it is important for the president to be conscious of the pulse of america the same way members of congress have to be conscious of it. They just have to be paranoid about it. The president should not be paranoid. There was a column about this recently. I thought about it. Basically, you spin the last year via first term running for reelection. Then you run into the problems in the second term. I thought it was an important exercise for the president to go back to the country and run for reelection. I dont think we want to divorce the president from the electorate after the first election. I am strongly opposed to a sixyear term for all the reasons andy and david gave. I want to take the opportunity about thelk challenge, whether it is president obama will or president reagan, it was to try to make sure he is succeeded by somebody of his own party. Reagan was able to do that with George Herbert walker bush. What you have to go back about 50 years but you have to go back about 50 years before that is true for a twoterm to be succeeded by someone of his own party. That is one of the measures of the importance of a second term, that you mentioned before about staying relevant. Erskine, do you feel different . I do. I have the opposite opinion. If i felt the president s just spent the last year of a fouryear term running for reelection, i might feel the same way. That david does. But i dont. I feel the campaign almost starts the day they are reelected or elected. I also think too many president s make decisions based on what kind of effect it will have on their reelection as opposed to what they might think is best for the country, so i would like to see one sixyear term. I think it could be very positive. Im influenced by the fact we made a bunch of disasterous local decisions we had to make. We were not thinking about reelection. We did not have that luxury. This is a good question. How does social media, is to reporting, 24hour instant reporting, 24hour news, affect the president ial Selection Process . When weiving in a time have moved beyond fireside chats. We have blogs, twitter, facebook, everything that immediately reports things. Thedoes all of that effect president ial decisionmaking process . Erskine, start with you. When we talked about this earlier, i thought andy had the best answer to that. Can andy tell that story first and then we will go into it . I first went to the white house after a forgettable campaign in massachusetts in 1982. I showed up in 1983 excited to be working at the white house for president reagan. Around 4 30 in the afternoon over a loudspeaker system that went throughout the west wing of the white house and Old Executive Office building were a lot of white house staffers are, there would be an announcement from the press secretarys office. The lid is on. That meant the news for the day had ended. Reporters were putting things into their editors. The evening news was ready to be broadcast. There was no more news. [laughter] it was like everybody in the white house, whew. [laughter] you could tell reporters practiced strong ethics because they would not run a story unless they had to sources. You could find out they had won sirs and they were trolling hard for that second confirming source, but they would not run it unless they had two confirming sources. All of a sudden, cable news came along and they could not run the loop enough over the course of the day to maintain eyes and ears. So they had to put alert breaking news. [laughter] they made the decision to go with one source, not two. Other cable news outlets came along and radio talk shows. They said we are just going to go with a good rumor if anybody response to it. [laughter] all of a sudden, the momentum changed. It was a 24hour cycle. The lid was never put on. Now we have opportunities to communicate instantaneously. It shows up in a tweet. Somebody is was invited to respond. We respond without thinking. All of a sudden, the response ands out in 140 characters the person who puts them out owns the response and they refuse to move off of it even if they know what is wrong. So they dont allow good judgment to be used. So we are communicating instantaneously with our emotions. Congress is the most paranoid so they communicate the most with your emotions and echo them. Judgment, which is what our republic was founded on, we were founded as a democracy that had representatives represent us offering some judgment before they made a decision. Senators took a longer time to consider judgment. The president could exercise judgment after watching what happened in congress. Now we are reacting to emotions very quickly. People get stuck on stupid with the responses they make. We dont taste words before we spit them out. Our films are not restrained as we punch. Htag is used before we rehash. [laughter] [applause] how do you feel about it . [laughter] back cant put that genie in the bottle, so our democracy looks less like a judgmentinformed republic and is emotionally driven. People do get stuck on stupid and government does not work. There are many bad manifestations. I started off as a newspaper reporter covering politics in the early late 1970s and early 1980s. We had 24 hours to report our story or as much time as we needed. There was not this deadline pressure every 10 minutes, every 10 seconds, with every tweet, every rumor. The other thing that has happened is because of cable competition and so on, everything gets blown into a humongous story. Every day is election day in washington. Every story is going to define the presidency. Use, thise i always was not a small thing by any stretch, but when the oil leak , it was to the gulf called obamas katrina. It was going to be the end of his presidency. It came. It was dealt with. I dont think it came up once in the 2012 campaign. One of the disciplines you have to learn when youre in the white house is to evaluate these rabbits and not chase them all down the hole and recognize there are not many defining stories that come along in the course of a presidency, and you should not get in a panic along with the rest of the political and journalists and pseudojournalists. There, iyear i lived came to believe Hubert Humphrey was right when he described washington is 26 square miles as 26 square miles surrounded by reality. [laughter] thoughts . My problem is because of modern media. When you have the arab spring in cairo, tahrir square, you have a protester arguing against the United States. Ou have a split screen the white house podium in the press room is responding to a protester in instant time. ,f you are in the white house you dont need to think about winning the second or the minute. You need to win the months and years. You need a consistent strategy. You dont know who this protester is. You dont know what he or she stands for. To equate that person with the podium of the president of the United States and having the press secretary responding seems to me to be dangerous for governing, especially in america. Social media has affected presidency in another way. You touched on it. The arab spring started with a fruit peddler in tunisia who led himself on fire. This went viral. The whole region went up. This is another thing that makes the presidency more difficult today than it has ever been before. Talking about the press, obviously president s rely a great deal when running in a campaign on the press. When they suddenly going to the the presse, in part, turns fickle against that particular president. The president starts to get paranoid about the press. Dontents begin they do is me press conferences. They dont go out and do with the press as much. Betweenthe relationship the president you serve and the press. How did he regard the press . What was the relationship like . Ronald reagan respected the press. It was an adversarial relationship, but he loved a bunch of the press people. First and foremost believe it or not with Sam Donaldson, who always gave him a shouted question. You remember reagan with his ear cant hear you, sam. [laughter] we did not want reagan to answer the question. Before we walked outside the room, i ordered the pilot of the helicopter to start his engines. [laughter] because you never want to make the president of the United States a liar. I cant hear you. Well, he could not hear him. The president encouraged all of us to spend time with the press because even off the record if we could not answer their questions, we had better go back and do wor more homework. Onelast thing i will say, of my fondest vignettes of the press and reagan was sam , Andrea Mitchell of nbc news, they were all fighting about who would do the last weort on air force one as headed back to california at the end of the reagan presidency. , on a portablery typewriter, was Sam Donaldson on the floor of air force one typing the final full report, and reagan came back to say thank you. That is the kind of relationship, even when it gets tough. Irancontra, my job in the aftermath was to remind reagan before he went within set shouting distance of sam, andrea, or anybody else, remember if you answered a question on iran contra, you might as well not give the giveh you are going to because no one will cover it. You are wasting your time if you answer it. I used to do this on a daily basis. He did good for five or six weeks. Then sam would hit something and bam. That night after talking with nancy i would get a phone call. Yeah, i messed up today, i wont do it again. [laughter] i knew we were good for another five or six weeks. Erskine, the president and the press . You can answer this one. [laughter] i was about 12 years old and you were chief of staff, ken. [laughter] president. Was press,s thought the because they were so liberal, that they did not like reagan because he was conservative. I found out when i became chief of staff that was not true. I think it is very tough. You want to make sure you always tell the truth. They keep the press informed. You have to feed a hungry beast. But they are insatiable. I found it to be a real challenge. I can tell you know sin or deed unpunishedlished or unpublished in the white house. You have to work at it every day. You have to wake up and decide youre going to do the right thing and always tell the truth. If you do that, youll be all right. President at a press conference, we used to have a group around the table. The president would sit there, and we would fire questions that were going to come from the press. Fire questions at the president. They could be very uncomfortable questions. The president would just lift up off the floor. He would circle around. I remember al gore used to say, that is a fine answer, mr. President. That will make the news. [laughter] the president would settle down and come back and get the right answer in his head and he would be good. It was really almost a therapy session to try to deal with what the press was going to ask. Andy . I found the president liked the reporters but did not like the way they did their job all the time. [laughter] if you were on the good side of president bush, you had a nickname. Almost every reporter heading in name. He really liked them. He also viewed their relationship with them as cynical because he knew they were cynical of him. He was cautious and friendly. It was not something he was always comfortable doing. But he did not shy away from talking to the press. He had more press conferences than people realize. He was more accessible to the press than president obama by quite a factor. It was not anything he relished doing. They were institutionally not allowed to see themselves as friendly to an administration, so i think theyre always going to be hostile. That is the nature of the medium. It is part of our democracy. I always thought it was a mistake to invite them into the white house rather than have them just cover the white house because their offices are in the white house. That means they have access to people who cannot help themselves from leaking, and that is always a problem for a chief of staff. David . I have the perspective of having been a reporter. I spent a lot of my career explaining to clients the job of reporters. It is not to befriend the person youre covering. I am a believer in interaction between the president and the press. The thing that is complicated today is the thing we talked about before because it is different than when Ronald Reagan was president. The deadline pressures, the competitive pressures, the lack of editorial judgment on some of these organizations that can drive a news cycle even though nobody quite knows what it is or who is running it or whether it is credible or not, it makes it difficult. For obama perhaps it has been a little stinging at times because he got such a good ride for such a long time. We got incredible treatment when he ran for president. When they started behaving the way reporters do, he was taken aback a little bit. Sayink everyone here would every president says i dont read that stuff. Then they will quote a paragraph in some blog. [laughter] i think one great advance in president ial press relations would be to remove the president ial ipad. [laughter] i agree with that. Interesting question. What one piece of advice that you gave the president that he rejected that you almost resigned over . You might have to think about that. [laughter] i think probably the way to ask it is, did you ever feel you were close to walking out of the place . I did not agree with every decision the president made. I respected how he made the decisions, and i respected they were his decisions to make. In terms of a tough decision he objections voiced my was around Stem Cell Research. This was not an emergency crisis type issue. This was an issue presented in the context of the federal budget. No money had ever been spent on Stem Cell Research by the federal government. Nih and other institutions were looking to see if they could spend money on research. It was presented as a budget question the president said he would take under consideration. He asked me when the decision had to be made. I said it had been made before we spent the budget to congress. We have plenty of time. We plan to process. He brought in lots of expertise. People from the clergy, the medical profession, parents of children with diabetes, members of congress, ethicists, academics, researchers. Spent a lot of time doing homework. He read lots of material. There were lots of debates. He had staff people working on the issue. We met in the oval office. The president was struggling because he was prolife and did not want to allow the collection of stem cells from embryos and aborted fetuses, so he was very concerned. He wrestled with the decision. I think there were 20 people in the oval office, which was unusual. For one last debate, everybody offered their views. He announced he wanted everybodys opinion. He went person by person around the room and asked what would you do. Opinions were all over the place. He came to me. I was literally the last person. I said you know i offer my counsel to you after you have heard everybody else. We go to the back room and a basically tell him this person was afraid to speak up because someone else was bullying them. I was being the honest broker. He said i want everybody to hear what you have to say, so i told him i would support funding for Stem Cell Research. He said thank you very much. Then he said i will have an answer for you tomorrow. He walked out of the oval office. The next morning, he came in. I would do is greet him optimistically because i wanted him to be in a good mood. Top of the morning, mr. President. [laughter] i am sure he was glad to see you. [laughter] sure. Said, youre going to be mad at me. You will not like what im doing great he said i made the decision. You will not like it. Not going to fund Stem Cell Research except for the seven lines that have already been collected. I will allow funding for that but not for any more stem cells to be collected unless they come from adult stem cells. He said im sorry to disappoint you. I said, you did not disappoint me. It was your decision to make. It was not my decision. I respect how you made the decision. Im comfortable with it. I tell you that as an example. I never came close to resigning over that decision. But it was one where we disagreed. There were many other times were we disagreed and would have conflict. But i can honestly say there was not one time where i felt i was ethically or philosophically challenged to the point where i could not respect that the president s decisions were his decisions and i should be able to implement them or have others implement them to live up to his expectations. Erskine . Believed everys president deserves somebody he can have a confidential conversation with. The president and i had many of those. I have never written any books. Not going to. Think it is important for a president to have some people he feels comfortable really working out his feelings on. I think everybody who works for a president ought to feel they can express their opinion. Issues that the president and i did not quite see eye to eye on. But i never came to the point on any of those where i felt i because my job at the end of the day was to express my opinion. If he decided it was his administration and that is what he wanted to do, my job was to support it. So i did. Ken, same thing . Absolutely the same thing as erskine and andy. Evenld only point out though i never came close to resigning, remember when howard when howard baker came to the white house, we came back, we did not know the truth about iran contra. So we question the president every which way of sunday, up and down, trying to see whether or not he was telling the truth. They did not know. I told this to an audience not long ago. Yeah, but heed, was an actor. I said yeah, but he was a bmovie actor. [laughter] convinced over a. Of weeks the flash we became d of weeksover aperio he was telling the truth. If we found out otherwise, it was our duty to the country to leave. But fortunately, that never happened. We were able to convince reagan all of us had this experience. When a president makes a mistake, convincing him to do me a call but to the American People a mea culpa to the American People is like 10 rue canals root canals. Andot reagan to do that, the American People gave him the benefit of the doubt. Any moment . My job wasd earlier, to provide political counsel. Aboutdeeply frightened entering into the health care issue, in part because of the expense president clinton had had and six other president s dating 65 years. And because of what i knew from the data and so on, i just felt it was a risky political proposition. It was a painful thing for me to give him that advice because i have a child with a chronic condition, and i have been through some of the hell we were trying to deal with with this law. I gave him what the politics were. That andud he rejected said there were things more important than that. That is why i work for him in the first place because i wanted to work for a president willing to look at politics and say this is more important for the country. There was never a point where i said i cannot abide that decision. Most always, he made decisions i appreciated. So, no. We have been talking about the president s we all served. Campaign, whotial do you think will be the nominees for both parties . And who would you like to be the nominees of both parties . Probably a better way to say it. I am for panetta. [laughter] [applause] believe if it were clinton runs for president on the democratic side, she is as overwhelming a favorite as i have seen in my lifetime for an open seat like this, which probably dooms her to say that. She iseally believe wellpositioned to win the nomination. I dont see anybody emerging who would challenge her in a serious way for the nomination. The republicans, that is a hard process to handicap. If jeb bush runs, it is one kind of race. If he does not, it is another kind that is not as obvious. I believe it is unlikely the next president will come out of the congress. I believe in the opposites theory which is elections are defined by the outgoing incumbent and never do People Choose the replica of what they had. They almost always choose the remedy. This is not judgmental. After bush, people wanted more nuanced, who saw the complexities, who was different than what they perceived they had. I think it is likely this time people will look for more of an executive mentality, governor. In that sense, hillarys experience as secretary of state is useful because it took her out of the legislative realm. Andy . Sayirst of all, i want to america is a great country. The most powerful part of the constitution is we. It is our government. It is allinclusive. It is a noble call to serve the American People. Theres no one who personifies Noble Service better than leon panetta. I think George Herbert walker bush did that. I think the president s we served have done that. Pickingn the process of the next noble servant. It will end up coming down to a binary choice. I think the most qualified person to be president is john ellis. Most of you say you dont know him. The truth is he has a great resume, and hes a great leader. His name is john ellis bush. Jeb. I think he would be your first choice. He is john ellis bush. I hope you will be a binary option for you to choose between. I would like to see him run. I am purging him to run. That does not mean he will. He is the person i think has the best resume, temperament, policy commitment grounded in values and would be a good president. Im trying not to be a bush sycophant saying that. There are others i would look to on the republican side. I like going to the pool of governors we have more than the pool of congressmen or congress ladies, people serving on capitol hill. But i think the process is relatively wide open on the republican side. It is not unlike what happened in 1979 and 1980. I still remember most of these people. You will forget they ran for president. Cresswell, larry john conley, howard baker, bob dole. We had Ronald Reagan, george bush. A lot of people were running. Ronald reagan was not the favorite, but he was the front runner. This process will probably turn for churn for quite a while and a front runner will emerge that will be the nominee. Bennett will be a binary choice. Remembermocrat side, i being with leon in tennessee. About this time in the calendar year. The question came up, who do you think will be the next president of the United States . Leon probably said Hillary Clinton eight years ago. I said way too early to make that prediction. Oh, no, it is going to happen. I remember howard dean was going to be president. It is very early. We will get there. Jeb bush would be my choice, and i hope he runs. We have a few minutes. What do you think, erskine . Just a comment on jeb bush for a second. I have done several events with him, particularly on education. He is a very impressive person and i think has the kind of experience you would want to see in a candidate for president. Im all in for Hillary Clinton. I think she is extraordinary. What most of you all have not seen that leon and i have is her general and warmth. I remember when some of these kids in the white house were in the toilet. Somehow or another, she knew. She would show up and get their spirits back, and they would be ready to go. At the same time, we were facing a tough decision her judgment was terrific, so i am for hillary. I hope he runs. I think he would be a hell of the president. Hillary i think has the democratic nomination if she decides to run. Can i say one thing about jeb bush . Im sorry. Go ahead. I share erskines view. I think the great challenge for him is nothing tells me you would not. But can he resist what the other candidates on the republican side have yielded to in the last few cycles . Can he maintain his positions rather than trying to cater to the right wing of the party . If he does that, i think he will be a formidable candidate. [applause] gentlemen, we have had a fascinating discussion this evening. We have all served different president s who have a different place in history. But i can tell you one thing. I think it was an honor for all of us to be able to serve the president of the United States. [applause] thank you thank you very much. See you next year. Every sunday, you can learn from leading historians about president s and first ladies, their policies and legacies. Watch any of our programs or check our schedule, visit www. Cspan. Org