Another interesting discussion to turn to. For me this is a real honor and a personal privilege to introduce our luncheon guest ambassador rice. She is certainly no stranger to the womens foreignpolicy group and thrust her career shean has representative the best of the values that we promote. We all know her from her public life in the Clinton Administration she served as one of the youngest secretaries of straight state ever and went on to serve as ambassador to united the United Nations and National Security adviser to president obama. Enter triptych new book called tough love she takes us behind the scenes of u. S. Foreign policymaking from the rwandan genocide to the bombing of the u. S. Embassy in east africa to syria benghazi and more. She gives a cleareyed insight of these and other top National Security moments. She is a the table and even in the crosshairs of the american political discourse. What i like most about susans book is not just the foreignpolicy discussion. Its also her personal story. Its captivating as the momus in the situation room. Susan really sums that up. I need to share what ive learned along the way. Its important toys do your best. That is susan for sure. [applause] of course there was no one better to interview her tonight than susan page. We have a lot of citizens here today. The Washington Bureau chief of usa today preseason page has covered six administrations and reported in six continents. Am not the reception a biography of nancy pelosi entitled madam speaker so please join me in welcoming susan rice and susan page. [applause] c thank you. Never been in the room with so many women who have name cards with ambassador before their name. That is really remarkable and its an honoror to be here to he the opportunity to talk to susan rice who also has ambassador in front of her name. Please fill out a card with your questions and i will try to catch up with those. She is the author of this new book tough love and im not going to criticize the fact that the subtitle seems to end with a supposition. [laughter] my story of the things worth fighting for. At least its understandable. They are the things for which i am worth fighting. Do think that would have sold . [laughter] well, i dont know. Possibly not. You know also before he got a question set like to note that this would make an excellent Christmas Gift and i think they are going to be for sale. They are for sale. Feel free to buy for your friends and family. Its important for people who care about foreignpolicy and care about politics and democrats and possibly republicans, for women ands mae also men and if you get them autographed by the arthur when you give them away it will make you look important. You can say whatever he wanted to say, to my best friend janet or whatever you want. I would definitely recommend this book and i congratulate you on your book in and your remarkable career. Thank you so much. [applause] i just want to say thank you to all the folks in the womens foreignpolicy group. Its an honor to be back here and to be able to share this occasion with you. Kathy said something i thought was important but your book which is its not only about foreignpolicy. I have read a lot of washington memoirs where you dont ever get a sense of the person behind the policymaker for any personal struggles. In your book you are pretty candid about your parents divorced a custody battle that follows in very as ways. Was it difficult for you to ride about some of that personal stuff . It was really important for me not to ride a traditional washington memoir. One, they are boring and too they seem to be quite selfserving b and three thats not what i was setting out to do. I wanted to share as best they could and with a lot of candor who i am and where i came from and what i learned with the hope that it can be of use to other people. Theres no point in sharing what youve learned if youre only prepared to share the good stuff in the happy stuff. Go back. Y this is very much a personal story. You have to wait a ways before you get to the policy stuff. Its a personal story that goes back to my parents and grandparents and even actually my great grandparents. My mothers family were immigrants from jamaica who went to Portland Maine in 1912 and my grandparents had nothing. When was the janitor and one was a maid with no education. They sent all five of their kids to college. Two of my occult were doctors want a University President want an optometrist and my mother who had a remarkable career in Higher Education policy was instrumental in establishing the program and saddam 11 corporate boards and was a corporate leader. My dad talks about his background growing up in segregated South Carolina growing up in 1920 the grandson of a the founded a school in new jersey called Boys Town School in the late 1880s. It went on for 70 years to educate generations of africanamericans in technical and vocational skills and also College Preparatory fields. This is the family i came from. I want to share that and i wanted to share what i learned from my parents and grandparents because of such powerful knowledge and i wanted to talk about what shaped it and what it was like to grow up in washington d. C. In the 60s, 70s and early 80s. I had the great privilege of attending some of the best tyhools in the city as a young africanamerican woman. From them. Lot 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 divorces that was a cinch to mental as any in shaping me. Whether talking about my childhood or my struggles as a mother and my marriage and being the daughter of bill parents while im serving as ambassador National Security adviser all of those personal laments are critical to who i am. I think the how and why i performed in the ways they did. You go back and look at things in detail in your life. You figure out things that you have never figured out before. Was there anything that you found it illuminating to yourself . Yes. I mentioned already my childhood but i cant feel like a really since high school that then sprinting through my life through college to graduate school and through my early career and i never really had time to process and digest how my experiences particularly with it with my familys breakup had affected me. I was charging to keep going. Even in the process and difficult documents and depositions from my parents custody battle. Now i can appreciate from a chick adults perspective. The other big learning was how much my time in the Clinton Administration particularly my experience as assistant experience as assistant affairs also was a critical learning experience. I was 32 years old when i became secretary of state. I had started in government at age 28 at the National Security council as a junior staffer on the nfc staff for peacekeeping. I run the Africa Office for a couple of years and then i was nominated to go to the state department. I dont think i appreciated at the time the extent of the challenge that i faced as the 32yearold africanamerican mother of a 3monthold child breastfeeding in the state department trying to win the trust and confidence of the career ambassadorial core that was 20 or 30 years my senior and predominantly white male career positions. I struggled in that period and i made some significant mistakes which i ride about in the book. I have friends and mentors who are kind enough to take me and say you are going to this up unless he makes some significant course corrections. I talk about with great affection somebody who may be known to some ofal you u. S. Congressman howard wolf who in the second term of the Clinton Administration worked with me on African Bureau but he was president clintons special envoy in central africa. A political appointee but one with tremendous knowledge and experience and in the book the year into the job the magic gourd that you will know as the Chinese Restaurant near the state department. [laughter] he sat me down in the said look you are smart to get that vision. You have the support of the secretary and the president but you are about to fail because you are too hardcharging. You are not taking enough of the input and experience in the knowledge of those on this team and i want to see you succeed but this is what you are going to have to do. That was an extraordinary gift. It was tough love in the purest form. He didnt have to take me out. He didnt have to share what he thought. He could have let me fail but hed didnt. Ive learned from those experiencess so to reflect on my personal and professional development. Particularly the latter for when i was at the state department with the incredible learning experiences. He on the Obama Administration there were a number of women who had authority on National Security. It was you and deputy National Security adviser haines and lisa monaco. President obama had a word for the three of you. What did he call the three of you . Ii revealed revealed this in the book. We were paranoid that i was going to leak. With all of their knowledge and permission he joked as i was describing in the book it was the perfect moniker for us because we are fighting on behalf of of the moral good and wouldnt suffer anybody who got in their way. The theories were foulsmelling hags. You cant call it that. He said no, no you have two understand the perfect it is. Theres a funny story because one saturday afternoon lisa monacoft came and the three of s went to the oval. Its saturday so with a little more relaxed and more casual. She rings and for the president to see a cartoon from the new yorker which i reproduce in the book. Its called furious 2. 0 and it shows their nicknames and lisa had mummified one which was passive aggressive which is supposed to be me. She crossed out pass of the. [laughter] theres a famous piece is a photograph of the three of us laughing hysterically at the president leaning over his desk and a caption said they are laughing about the cartoon in the new yorker that resembles the three of them. Without explaining the resemblance. It was a hugee privilege to be able to server president who greatly appreciated strong women and their willingness to give him their best. He what difference does it make . How is policymaking different in the practice of National Security because of the several women involved in doing it . Well, its different and its not different. Its different in the sense that we really thought that we were a team. We had each others backs and by the way the team also included beyond the three of us the nsc chief of staff and the deputy National Security adviser and the Deputy National economic adviser. The three most senior were and we disagreed often on substance but we s knew that we had each others back and woe unto anybody who tried to drive a wedge between us particularly from the outside. I hoped and believed we led a session that was supportive of the human beings on the team. In other words i and i think all of us tried very hard to lead people with an appreciation as individuals were that they were mothers and fathers or wives are ill husbands or children that were struggling. Family came first. Even in the hot house of the white house and president obama underscore that from the top so weather was me with my mother in the hospital when she was dying or whether it was the colleague whose husband had had a stroke the message from the top down but we tried to underscore was go do what you have to do to be as fully as you can as a human being and we the team will fill in behind you. Its simple logic. If you are struggling and in a horrible moment in your personal life you arent going to perform well anyway and if you have colleagues who will be there for you you are going to perform optimally. If you get the impression they dont care then why should you care . So that kind of leadership commitment, that kind of compassion that thankfully came from the top down and we as a team were able to them part of core value probably lead. He great question from sue gordon who i think is left so you can tell her i gave her credit for this. In the Obama Administration, the best thing. He best day of the Obama Administration. For me there were many but the happiest day for me had nothing to do with foreign policy. It was the day the Supreme Court affirmed the right of marriage. That was such a happy day because one, it was so right and two, it was so joyful and it mattered in the most profound way. I still get choked up thinking about it but we live at the white house in rainbow colors and everybody celebrated regardless of their Sexual Orientation or who they love. It was a a moment of pure joy. I wouldnt have guessed that. Whats the worst day for you. [laughter] too many to count. I ride about it in the book. Some of you may choose not to hear this it revolved around the snowdon experience. Some tough days around russian interference and the election but honestly i cant name all of them. There were also a lot of good days when it came to National Security and foreign policy. The fact that as i ride in the book we really jump landing on ndat. We had two years of secret negotiations than ever leaked and we werego able to unveil all of the changes simultaneously. The iran deal and many days worth celebration that. Joy. Thats talk for a moment about President Trump. Oh man. You go from pure joy. [laughter] okay im ready. He you introduced it in your book. You tell an anecdote about your first and last meeting with President Trump. T. Ll us about it. My first and only encounter with donald trump occurred at the 2015 white house Correspondents Dinner which you will all know was an odious affair. But an important one. He there was the free press. He i think the president of the nights he should attend it with regularly are regularity. I digress. Im sitting at one ofng these roundtables like you are facing forward and it was one of these programs were people are up mixing. I sense fromd behind this presence and literally this presence is grabbing me by the shoulders and almost lifting me out of my chair. Turn around and its donald trump. He hugs me. I had never about him before. So i was kind of freaked out. He holds me and by the way i hasten to add this is not the touchyfeely physically uncomfortable hug. It was uncomfortable because i dont know you and you are big. [laughter] and you areab not letting me go. He whispers in my ear you have been very unfairly treated overe benghazi and you are doing a doeat job for the country. I was like wow. Im not sure what to do. [laughter] we were asked to pose for a couple of photos which are in the public domain. Both of us i think smiling more than we would wish in retrospect that was mype only encounter wih donaldh trump. From that first and only experience given how harshly he is criticized my boss and me and any of my colleagues only a few weeks before he announced his run for the presidency i was made aware with firsthand experience of the gap between what he was prepared to say in public and what he might say in private. We have heard chris talk about President Trumps intelligence. You dont have firsthand knowledge about how President Trumped is intelligence. How would you characterize in terms of his attitude towards and his useid of intelligence . I do want to be careful about answering that t. To make an applestoapples 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 having the capacity or maybe the patience to absorbt it fully. Sue was right when she said president obama was a voracious reader. He read every night until two in the morning stacks and stacks of papers. I think it is fair to point out 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 whether intelligence or opensource facts that dont accord with his predisposition and thats not something that gives me comfort or confidence when it comes to National Security. Let me ask you a question asked by someone in the audience. This person writes a number of former Obama Administration officials have come out against u. S. Support for saudi arabia and yemen and former Vice President said he would treat the king is the pride. Why do you think these statements aree important and do you expect president obama to weigh in on yemen or other study related issue or the murder of Jamal Khashoggi . First of all im among those who have been critical of the saudi role in yemen and critical and public of our decision in the Obama Administration to launch our partnership with saudi arabia and in yemen. Actually i should rephrase that. Not so much launching it but continuing it when it went off the rails. I think thats something that given how that conflict has unfolded people of conscience have reason to regret. Im not familiar with Vice President biden statement about treating saudi arabia as a pariah. In my own judgment there are many reasons to be critical of and concerned about the direction of sa