your relationship? friendly. talked a lot. sometimes. when you worked on a deal, talked on the phone, in person? mostly in person. i was two doors down. i would go upstairs and speak to him. but to return to your question about how is it that i meet people like that, as an example, knocking on donald trump s door and saying hi, let s start working. when i was working on telecommunications deal, i was invited to a dinner party in moscow. and there was a lot of russians there. i was there and a guy walks in, an american guy older. and somebody says, you guys should meet each other. you re both cia agents. i thought it was a joke. and all evening long. he s predicting your future. i think so. i think he was. and he is sitting there and peppering me with questions all night long. i go to the bathroom. he follows me into the bathroom and says can i have your phone number. i said sure. i d like to talk to you about business. i said no problem. i give him my phone number.
i would go upstairs and speak to him. but to return to your question about how is it that i meet people like that, as an example, knocking on donald trump s door and saying hi, let s start working. when i was working on telecommunications deal, i was invited to a dinner party in moscow. and there was a lot of russians there. i was there and a guy walks in, an american guy older. and somebody says, you guys should meet each other. you re both cia agents. i thought it was a joke. and all evening long. he s predicting your future. i think so. i think he was. and he is sitting there and peppering me with questions all night long. i go to the bathroom. he follows me into the bathroom and says can i have your phone number. i said sure. i d like to talk to you about business. i said no problem. the next day i meet him in an irish pub in moscow now far from the kremlin. his name is milton blaine where he proceeds to tell me he s been a military intelligence operative for the government for
assuming that democrats want to work with republicans. look, this began when obamacare was passed, it was ran through congress without consulting without any republican votes. so they began this. and i don t see a genuine effort by democrats to really want to sit down with republicans to work on something. again, i don t think this is over. i think this is going to take time. legislative process is a messy process. i think we have to give it time. however, what i would say is that let s start working, let s start debating on other pieces of legislations like tax reform. we you can t get tax reform wow the tax cuts from this. i know a lot of people felt that tax reform is dependent on health care reform, but i think we ll have to at the same time start debating tax reform because if not, we may end up this year without any legislation. and i think tax reform is
what we are seeing is a realization by the white house that we have to be more honest about the fact that to defeat isis and start shaping the battle for those long-term strategic points the administration wants to do which most people are for, you have to create conditions so those things and start working, to create conditions you must defeat isis and that is why we recognize we don t want to put 100,000 troops back into combat but we have to be as secretary carter said use more direct action to be effective and shutdown isis. jenna: there was not the same expectation in afghanistan, putting 100,000 troops in afghanistan was not originally the goal. we are talking raids again. curious whether or not you see eventually going in that direction where we do see despite the resistance and incredible amount of american boots on the ground. this is the thing we must be cautious of. we cannot nation-building. a lot of folks recognize we
too early to talk about how this story, about the george washington bridge. remember when bill clinton started to run for president? that is pure ignorance. october 3rd, 1992. no, 91. no, i think it was 1962. but the 92 campaign, when did he start worrying about it? when he went on johnny carson and worried how the convention speech was playing. the point is you do start working. it is a four frankly, it is truly a four to eight-year process. jon meacham and i, we have been talking about this an awful lot and you re teaching a course on the republican party. while i was putting my book together we were talking about the history of the republican party. richard nixon started running for president in 1958 when he was going around campaigning. that is the good old days. that is the good old days.