Making from rwandan genocide to the bombing of us embassies in east africa, syria and more. She gives a clear eyed insight into these and other topNational Security moment. Susan was in the room at the table and even in the crosshairs of american political discourse. What i like most about susans book is not just the foreignpolicy discussion, its also her personal story which is really just as fascinating and captivating as the moments in this situationroom. I think susan sums it up best. I aim to share what ive learned along the way. The importance of alwaysdoing your best. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and drive yourself down the court to the bucket while maintaining grace under fire. Thats susan, for sure. [applause] and of course theres no one better to interview susan rice and susan tate. We have a lot of susans here today. The awardwinning bureau chief of usa today. Susan has covered six administrations and reported on Six Continents and doesnt of foreign countries. An author herself shes working on a biography of nancy pelosi entitled madame speaker so join me in welcoming susan rice and susan page. Thank you gabby. Ive never been in a room with so many women with name cards that have ambassador before their name. That is remarkable. Its an honor to be here with this group and to have the opportunity to talk to such a groundbreaker who herself as ambassador in front of her name, susan rice. Im going to post questions, feel free to send out cards with your questions. Ill catch up with a couple of those. Of course the author of this new book tough love, im not going tocriticize the fact that the subtitle seems to end with a preposition. Im just saying. My story or the things worth fighting for. Its at least understandable. My story would be the things for which are worth fighting. You think that would have pulled . I dont know, possibly not. Before we go to questions iwould like to note that this would make an excellent christmas gift. And i thinkits going to be for sale. Feel free to buy for your friends and family. The appropriate for people who care about Foreign Policy or politics. It would be appropriate for democrats or possibly also republicans, for women, maybe also men and if you get the autographed by the author, when you give them away as a gift it will make you look important. I will inscribe it to whatever you want to say, to my best friend janice. I would definitely recommend this book and congratulations on the book and on your remarkable career. Iq kathy for your introduction and thank you to all the folks in the womens foreignpolicy group area and its an honor to be back here and im excited to be able to share this occasion with you. One, kathy said something important about your book which is is not only about Foreign Policy area and its also about you and ive read a lot of washington memoirs where you dont ever get a sense of the person behind the policymaker or about any personal struggles and in your book youre pretty candid about your parents divorce, the custody battles that followed that shook you in various ways. Was it difficult for you to write about some of that personal stuff . It was important or me not to write a traditional washington memoir. One, its laborious. Two, they seem to be quite selfserving and really, thats not what i was setting up to do. I wanted to share as best i could and with a lot of candor who i am and where i came from and what ive learned with the hopes that it can be of use to other people. And theres no point in sharing what youve learned if youreonly prepared to share the good stuff and a happy stuff. So i actually go back, this is very much a personal story. And you have to wait a ways before you get the policy stuff. And its a personal story that goes back to my parents and grandparents, even actually my greatgrandparents area my mothers family were immigrants from jamaica who went to Portland Maine in 1912 and my grandparents had nothing. One was a janitor, one was a maid, no education and they sent off five of their kids to college area two of my uncles were doctors, one a University President , one an optometrist and my mother who had a remarkable career in Higher Education policy was instrumental in establishing a Pell Grant Program and sat on 11 corporate boards and was a corporate leader and on my dads side i talk about his background growing up in aggregated South Carolina, born in 1920, the grandson of a slave area that slave founded a school in new jersey called the warden town school and in the late 1880s it went on for 70 years to educate generations of africanamericans in technical and vocational skills and also in College Preparatory skills. And so this is the family came from. I wanted to share that and wanted to share what i learned my parents and grandparents who gives such powerful knowledge and i wanted to talk about the forces that shape to me including what it was like to wash to grow up in washington dc in the 70s and early 80s. I had the great privilege of attending some of the best private schools in the city as a young africanamerican woman and i learned a lot from that. I learned from my parents really ugly and painful divorce and i couldnt be honest about who i am without sharing what that was about and how it affected me because among the many forces , that was as instrumental is as any in shaping me so whether talking about childhood or my struggles as a mother and my marriage and being the daughter of ailing parents while im serving as un ambassador and National Security advisor, all those personal elements are critical to who i am and i think also obviously to how and why i performed in the way that i did. Sometimes when you go back and look at things in detail in your life , you understand things you didnt understand at the time area that you figure out things you have never figured out before. Did any of that happen to you in writing thebook . Was there anything you found illuminating to yourself . Yes, i mentioned early in my childhood i feel like i really since high school had been sprinting through my life. Through college, graduate school, through my early career and i never really had time to process and digest how my experiences particularly with my family and their breakup had affected me. I was justcharging to keep going. So i learned a lot about myself and about my family and even in the process uncovered some really difficult documents. There was depositions from my parents custody battle. That gave me new insight into what i was seeing from a childs perspective but now could appreciate from an adult perspective area the other big learning was how much my time in the Clinton Administration, particularly my experience as assistant secretary ofstate for African Affairs also was a critical learning experience. I was 32 years old when i was namedassistant secretary of state. I had started in government at age 28 at the National Security council as a junior staffer, director on the nsc staff or affairs in peacekeeping and i run Africa Office at the nsc for a couple years and then i was nominated togo to the state department. And i dont think i appreciatedit at the time. The extent of the challenge that i faced as that 32yearold africanamerican mother of a threemonthold child, breastfeeding and the state department, trying to win the trust and confidence of career ambassadorial core that was 20 to 30 years my senior and predominantly white and male career officials and i struggled in that period and i made some significant mistakes which i write aboutin the book and i had friends and mentors who were kind enough to take me aside and say youre going to screw this up. Unless you make some significant course corrections. I talk about my great affection for somebody who may be known to some of you, late congressman howard woefully who in the second term of the Clinton Administration worked with me in the Africa Bureau but he was president clintons special envoy to the Great Lakes Region of central africa. And a fellow political appointee but one with in normas knowledge and experience and he as i write in the book took me out to lunch about a year into the job and the magic board which you will all know as a crappy Chinese Restaurant near the state department. And he sat me down and he said look, youre smart. Youve got vision. Youve got the support of the secretary and the president but youre about to fail because youre too impatient, youre too hard charging. Youre not taking enough of the input and experience and knowledge of those on the team. And i want to see you succeed. But this is what youre going to have to do area and that was an extraordinarygift. It was tough love in the purest form. He didnt haveto take me out. He didnt have to share what he thought he could have let me fail but he didnt and others didnt and i learned from those experiences so as i went and got to reflect on my personal and professional development, time over eight years but particularly the latter for when i was at the state department were incredibly important and valuable learning experiences class in the Obama Administration there were a fair number of women who had positions of authority on National Security. At the time it was you, deputy National Security adviser hain, lisa monico. President obama i gather used data work for the three of you, what did he call the three of you . He called us the fury very privately and i reveal this in the book. We were paranoid that was going to leak. I put it out so thats not a leak but all of their knowledge and permission. He called us the furies and joked as i described in the book but it was the perfect moniker for us because we were fighting on behalf of the moral good and wouldnt suffer anybody who got in our way. And we protested this is sexist. The furies were foulsmelling hags, you cant call us that. And he said no, you dont understand how perfect it is. And then went about his weight about how he thought it fit which in many ways it did and theres a funny story because one saturday afternoon, lisa monico came with the three of us, went into the oval and its saturday so its a little more relaxed and a little bit more time and its more casual and she brings in for the president to see a cartoon from the new yorker which i reproduce in the book and its called furies 2. 0. And it shows the three furies with their nicknames and lisa had modified one which was passive aggressive a. Its supposed to be me and she crossed out passive up. And theres a famous photograph of the three of us laughing historically with the president leaning over his desk and petes caption that he put the photograph out said there laughing about the cartoon in the new yorker that resembles the three of them. Without explaining that resemblance. So it was great. It was a huge privilege to be able to serve the president who greatly appreciated strong women and their willingness to give him their best unvarnished. What difference does it make . How is policy different or policymaking different for the practice of National Security different because of several women involved in doing it . Its different and its not different. Its different in the sense that we really felt that we were a team. We had each others backs. And by the way the team also included beyond the three of us, suzy george who was the nsc chief of staff, ben rhodes was deputy National Security adviser and wally at yellow was Deputy NationalEconomic Advisor area and so it wasnt all of us, only women but the three most senior were. And we disagreed often on substance but we knew we had each others back and were woven to anybody who tried to drive a wedge between us, particularly from the outside and i hope and believe that we also led in the fashion that was supportive of the human beings on the team. In other words, i and i think all of us tried really hard to lead people with an appreciation for their needs as individuals, whether they were mothers or fathers or wives of bill, husbands or children that were struggling. Family came first. Even in the hot house in the white house and president obama underscored that from the top so whether it was me with my mother in the hospital when she was dying, or whether it was a colleague whose husband had had a stroke, the message from the top down we tried to o was go do what you have to do to be as whole as you can as a human being and we the team will fill in behind you. And its the logic area if youre struggling in a horrible moment in your personal life theyre not going to perform well anyway. And if you have colleagues who you know value you as a human being and will be there for you, youre going to perform optimally. If you get the impression they dont care, and why should you care . So that kind of leadership commitment, that kind of collegiality and compassion that thankfully came from the top down, i think we as a team were able to impart as a core value of how we live. Let me steal a great question from sue borden who i thinkhas left. You can tell her i gave her credit for this. In the Obama Administration, best day. The best days of the Obama Administration. There were many, but the happiest day for me had nothing to do with foreignpolicy. It was the day that the Supreme Court affirmed the rights of gay marriage. And that was such a happy day because, so right. And two, it was so joyful. And it mattered in the most profound way to so many of our colleagues. And i get choked up thinking about it but we lit up the white house in rainbow colors and everybody celebrated. Regardless of their Sexual Orientation or whothey loved. It was a moment of just pure joy. I wouldnt have guessed that. Worst day for you. Too many to count. I write about in the book some of the worst days definitely probably sorry susan is not here to hear this revolved around the snowden experience. Some tough days aroundrussian interference in the election. But i honestly cant name all of them. There are also a lot of good days when it came to National Security and Foreign Policy. The opening to cuba and the fact that as i write in the book we stuck the landing on and we had two months, excuse me, two years of secret negotiations that never leaked and we were able to unveil all the elements of thosechanges simultaneously and effectively. The air and deal and many other days where they were worthy of celebration but pure joy. Lets talk for a moment about President Trump. Your book has, oh man. I know theres a surprise here. Okay, im ready. Your book, you introduce it in your book. You tell an anecdote about your first and last meeting with President Trump, tell us about that. So to speak. My first and only encounter with donald trump occurred at the 2015 white house correspondents dinner. Which you all will know is an odious affair. But an important one. And a symbol of the free press. Im all for that. Anyway. By the way i think the president of the United States should attend that with regularity and respect the press but i digress. Im sitting at one of these roundtables almost like you are and facing forward and it was one of these breaks in the program where people are up and about milling and mixing and i sense from behind this presence. And literally this presence is now grabbing me by the shoulders and almost lifting me out of my chair and i turned around and its donald trump. He hugs me. And i never met him before. So im kind of freaked out. And he holds me and by the way, i hasten to add this was not a touchyfeely physically uncomfortable fog, it was just uncomfortablebecause i dont know you and your big. And youre not letting me go and he whispers in my ear, youve been very unfairly treated over ben ghazi. And youre doing a great job for the country. And i was like, wow. Im not sure what to do with this. So we were asked to pose for a couple of photos, it was in the public domain. Both of us i think smiling more than we would wish in retrospect. And now was my only encounter with donald trump. So from the first and only experience given how harshly he had criticized my boss and me and many of my colleagues and this is only a few weeks before he announcedhis run for the presidency , i was made aware with firsthand experience that there was a gap between what hes prepared to say in public and what he might say in private. We heard susan talk about how President Trump uses intelligence and how its the same and different previous president s. You dont have the previous encounter at dinner, you dont have first 10 knowledge about how trump uses intelligence but you had a lot of experience in seeing president s use intelligence. How would you characterize how he is similar to or different previous president s in terms of his attitude towards andhis use of intelligence . I want to be careful about answering that because im not in the room so to make an apples tos comparison is quite difficult , from the outside, he seems not to either have confidence in what hes learning from the Intelligence Community or not necessarily have the capacity maybe or the patience to absorb it fully. And sue is right when she said president obama was a voracious reader. He read every night until two in the morning. Stacks and stacks of paper. And i think is fair to point out that different people learn and process information differently and thats not inherently a bad thing. What i worry about with President Trump is he seems to disregard information from either intelligence or just opensource facts that dont accord with his predisposition and thats you know, thats not something that gives me comfo