Who is the prolific author of some 26 books and about 22 behind, mom. It is these snail mail dispatches from the Eastern Front that reappear lightly edited in parts of the book and they help give the dispatches narrative some Chronological Order from 1975 when i first became, first began working in congress until 2010 when dean Harry Harding blessedly rescued me. Now in editing these papers, the great folks at bancroft press works to encourage me to leave some of that naive enthusiastic impressionable boys in and i did so what you have here are some stories about washington, about moscow, about a meeting with Andrei Sakharov and andre dmytro with jimmy carter, meetings with the nixon family, ted kennedy and with a young senator barack obama. They are stories about freshmen senators guys like howard baker, john kerry and joe biden when they first showed up on the Foreign Relations committee in the senate where i was the leadership staffer working for the committee. And there are stories about people that i came to know in different aspects that i had have encountered previously people like nancy pelosi and juli Nixon Eisenhower became one of my true heroes and someone i greatly admire. So you have stories about president ial campaigns and Intelligence Leaks and investigations of Nuclear Weapons proliferation stories about leaking stories to the Washington Post in the New York Times and try not to get caught doing it. Most of them i confess i have never intended to publish and i blame it on you guys. I blame it on my students but when i stand up in class they say tell more war stories. Tell us what really happened. Dont give us the organizational chart. Tell us how things really get done. So i have sought to include some of these specific illustrations and avoid the generalities of some of the cautious case studies we use in the classroom and i will let you readers judge for yourself whether i succeeded or not. A word about chronology. These accounts from 75 to present are an odd numbered chapters and they flow in Chronological Order from nixon to obama but they are bracketed a short evennumbered chapters written in a much more mature voice i hope very these are sort of flashforwards. Theyre bookends. They try to lend grayhaired wisdom and perspective. More than anything they try to answer the question that you guys ask in my students ask most persistently, what do you wish you knew then that you know now . I have a great good fortune of teaching students in the weeks sometimes right before they go off to washington or new york or sierra leone to work with government, to work with ngos and the private sector. Part of my last room ritual is to make sure that we use Everything Possible is a teaching moment. We even have a special april fools day unit on policy failures and thankfully our government, our executive branch and once again today are supreme courts give us plenty of raw material to consider. Now i cant assure you that the work at hand is not nearly detox therapy for a recovering political adviser. Yes some of the passages have a ton of being confessional and this is part of examining the real motives of being in public life. How much of it is an ego trip . A simple hunger for power. I also plead guilty in the book to being an adrenaline junkie and will let nathan dylan have called me out on this repeatedly. Early on i got addicted to the excitement of being in the cabinet room at the white house or being in the Conference Committee wheeling and dealing with committee chairmen. Ill also had an awful lot of fun both wholesome and illicit but it was the proximity to power that was addictive and energized me as well. Now the book deliberately avoids spore settling. We have over those massive book of the month films that could be subtitled how right i was about the iraq war are by my political opponents are idiots. These books are so predictable and they are so rarely enlightening read there are plenty of pedestrian villains in washington and several times in the book i compare washington to high school. Think about your high school. You have your usual quota of heroes and bombs teachers pets and class clowns. Dispatches strive to look at the people inside these stories, to understand what motivates those especially those i disagree with passionately from Newt Gingrich to Ronald Reagan to as i have said the nixon family. I tried hard to see the nobility of their motives and what was their worldview and what the heck was that they were trying to accomplish. It also tries as my good friend sean casey so kindly notes in his generous blurb it tries to chronicle some of the political history of our time. Here for example is the opening of the chapter about engaging with the soviet union at the height of the cold war. And for those of you reading along at home this is page 191. The cold war waxed and waned for decades. For those of us the came of age in its midst of as the conflict marked by fits and starts. Some days in episodic spike intentions would erupt. American and soviet leaders would scare the hell out of citizens in both nations winning Nuclear Forces on alert and unleashing body zbella companys rhetoric. That felt like today. Then the crisis would pass and be what can be neatly freak months at a time that some of the 60,000 Nuclear Warheads loosen the world were targeted on our home communities. Skip ahead a bit i talk about time we met with the head of the soviet Nuclear Forces a gentleman named marshall nikolai or archive. A soviet official in charge of Nuclear Weapons. We drove to the military complex not far from red square. High ceilings hallways with dim lighting yielded to more formal chambers that felt a bit like the office of an Elementary School principal. Our escorts bowed nervously impact out the door. Standing before us i was with senator Alan Cranston of california and senator max matthias of maryland, standing before us was the man who controlled tens of thousands of Nuclear Weapons targeted at the United States and our allies. I kept thinking if war breaks out, this is the guy who will kill my family. He had a dark olive olive complexion this seemed to blend with his fatigues which were decked with dozens of medals. His demeanor was serious but his face seemed sad. He looked like the grandfather wearing about his progeny trait senator cranston led him into a dialogue about a nuclear exchange. Could a limited nuclear war ever be contained cranston asked. No Nikolai Bogart koff stated through translator. Escalation is inevitable. Could Missile Defense for protection senator cranston probed star wars plans for u. S. Missile defenses be the issue of the day . Know he responded matteroffactly after waiting for the translation. Offense is cheaper than defense. Interceptors can always be overwhelmed. Could either side ever when once a Nuclear Launch was initiated . Ogarkov pause before interrupting no, mutual suicide. He said it in english more in sorrow than in anger. So as you can see i wanted to sum up explicitly some of the lessons i learned on the senate floor or in moscow for the cloak rooms in white house negotiations. Some of the lessons were taught the hard way making mistakes in the public eye when stakes were quite high. Others were monetary triumphs. Each serve to educate me. Some were embarrassing but i included them anyway. And i trust they reveal more troops with more universal applications for readers. The narrative tries at times to to offer third persons perspectives but the authors voice out there sort of any man the staff guy the back of 100 camera shots and asked the reader what would you do . What should i have done it in that sense it is a teaching tool not a dear diary confession. We sure do need to take Lessons Learned from our mistakes. Think about obama redoing the abbottabad raid saying wed better get a third helicopter or think about obama saying what is wrong with hillarycare . Lets do the opposite and see if it works cut the deals of the white house and let the hill wreck the bill. That is one reason what my favorite textbooks i subject all of my students to as you can attest here tonight is thinking in time a book that may challenge is to look at policy history but always to ask what do we really know . What is unknown and whats most dangerously is if that we assume without evidence . You will be amused to know over the last couple of weeks doing all sorts of quirky tv shows and interviews in basements as the more hault with satellite with anchors at odd hours the Mainstream Media the first question id asked is tell us about your screwups. And i went, but i concede we do need to learn from our past. We need to be succeed in a timeless t. S. Eliot mission of returning to where we started and to know the place and to know ourselves for the first time. A couple more points before concluding. The book recounts a whole bunch of adventures. Talk about spiriting documents in the soviet union bringing Andrei Sakharovs memoir at United States a meeting with foreign leaders and spies hoping to write controversial bills on a few i hope consequential laws. But traveling the world and meeting heads of state in the senate Foreign Relations committee had found the most Common Element with all these folks that unites all humanity is their hunger for narrative. We all learned through stories. We connect the dots for kind in random acts in our busy lives through stories. We listen to the evening news eager for a story to be told to us. We hunger to find a reassuring narrative arts. When i try to sum it some up Lessons Learned in policymaking the vehicle was to my great surprise a very personal story. Now if you shop for books to read one political hacks shred another dispatches will disappoint you. Go watch bill orielly or al sharpton if you really want your prejudices reinforced. Fool that i am the only folks i call out by my name in this book are a couple of prominent reporters who i worked with for years who bitterly disappointed me and disappointed me by failing us on the whole iraq wmd question where they failed us by engaging engaging in so much caricatured about congress or about lobbying that i thought they had gone over the deep end. Im going to wait in hope that you cut that out. In conclusion, in conclusion is a book about people. Its about idealists. Its about the eagle scouts in the valedictorians i spoke of earlier, the young men and women who pour into washington for the 50 states determined to reshape the world. Finally it is also an explicit call to Public Service. I remained in this retelling an incurable optimist. I grew up in the california wonder years when government was a positive force in our lives building bridges and dams and highways and the nations best public schools. Id seen democracy at its best and ive seen it up close at its worst and i remain very confident that it contains the seeds of its own renewal. Hopefully readers of dispatches will reach the same conclusion. I thank you very much for your interest and now i very much welcome your questions and your thoughts. [applause] sir. You mentioned cranston and matthias. Think of them as examples of bipartisanship of Foreign Policy that i dont see much of anymore first i would like to hear what you think of the notion of bipartisanship specifically in foreignpolicy and if you agree if it has stated when did that begin to happen and what were the causes . Thats a wonderful question and in case all of you didnt hear its about five partisanship and when it ended and professor quandt points to two senators who did routinely worked across the aisle. They would in travel without members of the opposite party. Alan cranston of california and matthias of california. We all hearken back to the days of the last Great Sadness when things worked and congress was consequential. It went bad someday in the late 1980s when we were sitting in the well of the senate and we realize the roll call taking place at 9 00 at night had one purpose and one purpose alone and that was because senator jesse helms of North Carolina was putting out a direct mail piece and daring people to be the one in a 991 vote to get some nonsense resolution. When fundraising began to get into the roll calls and the amendments offered in committee, this is before the internet, before president obama is a candidate raised billions on the internet. When fundraising started to get into the actual tabulation of votes on individual roll calls it started to sour. When did he get worse . It got worse in about 2008, 2009, 2010 when a very effective strategy on the part of one party to block everything to try to shut the government down became fabulously successful at the polls in 2010 and now when you have senators who reach across the aisle running for reelection back home the there in peril to liberals in california in the open primary ended hurll obviously to the conservatives at the risk of getting tea party, lets call it what it is. Ask senator lugar. Ask senator corchran and some of the others if they face the pressure. What do we do about it . How it . How do we fix fix it . How do we dziedzic . I, mr. The glass is always half full would say there are people that are willing to buck that trend and we here in a purple state of virginia are blessed to have legislators who go out of their way to work across the aisle. Senator kaine of virginia who in our classroom told us he would never put in a bill without a republican sponsor. He says i pray with them in the morning and i play basketball with them at night and i will work with them during the daytime. Its folks like that to see our future the metal and who are rewarded politically by the voters. They are my source of hope. I will concede to you that they are still in the minority right now but i take some hope for millennials who agreed in a recent pew poll that the millennials arent affiliated with either party. Their independents and they are paying attention and they are not enamored of our institutions whether his wall streeter congress and they do have hope that they will reward the folks who go there to get stuff done as opposed to folks who go there to get reelected. In your memoir political idealism is tempered by reality than pervades most discussions about washington. After your experiences are you frustrated that the legislative process. [inaudible] by partisan disagreements and what our forefathers expected . Is a great question. Its a complicated question and i will restate it as at my cynical or is this what the Founding Fathers intended and i confess i always fall back as most of those professors do on federalist intent. Madison for soft actions and was horrified by factions that thought they were a necessary and part of the deal. I dont believe and i love to debate friends of mine left and right who want to go back to the strict construction of the constitution because the Founding Fathers were not strict constructionist. They scrap the articles of confederation in 10 years. They put 10 amendments on the bill of rights. They put the bill of rights and the constitution is part of getting it ratified and i think they would be horrified by the idea that our legislators spend more time catering to special interest in raising money than i did working together in the national interest. I dont think our Founding Fathers would stand for it. Obligate or a jefferson reference. Our beloved mr. Jefferson once read that expecting a grown man man expecting a government to live and im paraphrasing always under its original rules would be as much of of a folly as expecting a grown man to wear the same suit of clothing that he wore as a child. Jefferson proposed a one point some study constitutions every 20 years. Im not that radical but i do believe we should look at some of these standards; out exhibit a for the news that day. It seems clear to me we will have to have a constitutional amendment about campaign finance. Corporations are not people and mr. Adelson or mr. Stier dropping 100 million into campaigns i believe violates our equal protection rights and their Voting Rights so that is where i think we will end up. Am i frustrated . Yes. Do i think well have a Constitutional Convention tomorrow . No but i think that is where well end up. We will have to take some of the wisdom of our founders and make some changes. Sorry, didnt mean to give a speech. You paint yourself as the political [inaudible] he guilty. Going back in days you had balked similar to the washington beltway. Ronald reagan said mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. What would be your thought and tearing down the wall . I wish you could sit in my class charles because i sit out there and i see these right eager faces of optimists who are ready to go next week, next month to make an impact to go make change in that i contest is one of the sources of my optimism but i also think we are akin to people that we can challenge these things. Our Founding Fathers would be disgusted by the state of affairs and wash and in right now and i think they would take both major parties to task for it but i think democracy has its own renewal. I confess in 1975 it was a democrat and i grew up in a family that was not enamored with Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan to put it mildly but when i showed up there was an enormous opening to make change. There were major reforms. There was a checking of imperial president s something we need to do again is nelly. There was a restoration of government and sunshine. There were a number of reform measures and the Congressional Budget Office put together so we would hopefully get into the situation we are in now with deficits. So i think you have the instruments here and is frankly one reason i am so respectful of the tea party and i think it plays such a constructive role in our National Politics because it empowers citizens. The idea is that citizens can get fed up with the guy in the network and get so mad they wont take anymore and act. Thats the greatest of american traditions and that is why think it will play constructive role. We need to have young people do that not just an president ial election years and not just for one party but to demand that accountability starting as i suggest with campaignfinance reform and i would add to that list is as gerrymandering. We must stop the business of allowing entrenched incumbents to pick their own voters. We all know whats wrong. I met with one of my students today not for my Political Party who is determined to engage in this change and thats exactly what we need to do. We need to say enough of the incumbents picking their own voters, enough of the incumbents and these are some of my friends in the incumbency. They are addicted to the Campaign Cash or we need to change that. And then good things will happen. I was wondering if you could share her time in washington. The question is what are my biggest regrets . A little bit of paraphrasing of some of the reporters who almost literally said three, two, one tell us about your screwups. My regrets rincher sting. An opportunity to discuss this with the professor to get ideological diversity my classroom and old and dear friend who is a chief of staff the senator lugar when i worked for the democrats. I told them i think the thing i regretted the most was the work i did on nominations and let me explain why. During the reagan years we democrats have a job of scoring points against the administration that i quite frankly thought was wrongheaded on some of the Security Issues and some of the defense issues in mobile mx missiles rattling around charlottesville on rail cars, some things that i thought it makes sense. How did we score points in the minority . One of the ways we scored points was by beating up on the administrations nominees so you would have a fine lady or gentleman like Harry Harding noted china scholar bill kwon expert on the middle east or maggie rae brilliance on an arctic policy. They would come before the Foreign Relations committee before a confirmation what we did to them with savage. It was my job. If you asked me if i regretted i do and do make say why. We would sit on those little staff chairs and i remember a day when president bush the father of my favorite, had sent us a very wellqualified nominee to be foreign ambassador. The committee had in its possession documents which suggested that he had lied to us to a corporate something the president had done that had something to do with the iran contra and we were urged. We just lost another election and send it as in bush has said his close advisor to be confirmed by the committee. We did everything we could in this energetic staffers to figure out how to nail him. As he sat there in the chair he could see his wife and three daughters behind him in tears as we took turns throwing mud at them. Do i understand why i didnt . Yes. To understand by the members of the Democratic Party did that . Yes. We see the same thing happening with president obamas for nominees. We have seen that in the last few weeks. Its not something i was proud of. Its something i regretted and when you got that personal about the man or woman whose only crime was the willingness to serve United States government i felt lousy about it and we won a lot of those fights. Guys for human rights who didnt believe in and blocked dies for arms control and didnt know much about it but let me tell you the flip side of that story quickly. We were about to block that particular nominee and had all the democrats and we were back in the majority in this fellow, it would be the end of his career deepsixed i the senate and one of my democratic members and i worked for the leadership so even though i was a young guy they kind of respected me a little bit. I said i would like to see you in my office. I dont usually get called to another senators office. He closes the door and its just the two of us and he says jerry i know how hard you have worked on this nomination and how strongly the party feels about it and i want to tell you im going to vote to confirm it and i want to tell you to your face and i want you to understand why. The senator involved is senator charles rob and a. He looked me in the eye and he said i have had my reputation salvaged by something i didnt do and i felt terribly unfair. While we are not in a court of law if theres a shadow of doubt that this guy didnt do what you guys said he did im going to vote to confirm him for our country. I was frustrated and was a hothead political staffer but i so respected him for telling me that to my face and frankly i respected his logic and i think he did the right thing. The gentleman in question went on to serve the country honorably. I dont think im on his Christmas Card list but i do respect the process and i did live to regret that. Michael you had a question. I know a couple of you have to teach at six locks so i will try to wrap it up in 10 minutes. I think a lot of people like my generation are disaffected with the process of the system and view the call of service anymore nontraditional way doing Public Service outside of government. I am curious what your response to that would be and the other side of why you think the call to traditional Public Service is a viable option to make a difference . The questions about why a call to Public Service and why im so optimistic about this stuff. I have to tip our hat to frank batten the guy who founded the Batten School had wonderful conditions on this generous gift to us in one of them was he wanted us to assam people could lead from anywhere. He didnt just have to be a congressional staffer or an assistant secretary of something or other. His theory was that we need private sector leadership. We need the pta and the chamber of commerce weighing in on issues. We met our friends in neighbors engaged in the town Hall Meetings that go back to the founding of the republic. And so would dean harding and others at the Batten School and her team were trying to do is we are assuming you are going to lead from a different bunch of different places. Youre not just going to be a government official. You may be on wall street making a million bucks but you will also be involved in Civic Affairs and elections. He will be writing up beds. You will be arguing at the town hall about the bypass it was never built. Youll be working on these issues and to be a citizen in the sense that mr. Jefferson risley intended when he founded this university that everybody has a stake in it. I know there were mostly white male landowners in those days but i know mr. Jefferson would have embraced a more inclusive design. That is what we are trying to do in our modest entrepreneurial startup of the school and i think its the key to the future. Ngos will be a wonderful place to leave and i have talked to many during office hours about ngos you can go to med the difference. The guy passed out business cards. He recruited in my classroom. Come and work for us. Harry jackson is going to be here next week so i want you to work on our side. But there are a number of opportunities for you guys to get involved and make a difference. The other thing i will say which is surprising and i say this tipping my hat to my own three Adult Children involved in political life a lot of you folks who think washington is broken harkin back to the data doesnt exist exist anymore and professor quandt knows how big it was to cross the aisle but it doesnt happen anymore. They punish folks for trying to do it. A lot of those young folks are doing going local. My daughter working on urban policy and she can see the results of her policy efforts every day she walks to work when she rides the trolley. I think that maybe of course a lot of you guys are going to go or you can say do you know what washington, not so much that here in charlottesville or richmond or lynchburg around the commonwealth for your hometowns and cities around the country you are going to want to get involved at the local level and a great u. K. Education. Some of you have gotten so competitive will be fortunate enough to get a Batten School degree but i think youll be equipped for the civic life that mr. Jefferson originally envisioned and towards that end when i came to do my job talk and i confess i did write up something in this book so theres a little bit of telling tale. When i came here i citizen it weird that mr. Jefferson founded the university about civic leadership and spent 190 years passed before we opened a Public Policy system. Whats the deal with back . That was my smart aleck question probably on a close vote they brought me in anyway. How about one last question . Im going to give it to dean harding. That was not a setup. C. This is a twopart question. [inaudible] gannott what pops in mind as the best example in your life and your career is learning the hard way and easy way . Thats a great question. I can do learning the hard way really quick way. As bill kwon and others will remember a bunch of senators virtually half of my committee had some idea they could be president of the United States because they were smart. Half the Foreign Relations committee ran for president. As i they say this remember hagan and kerry and biden all came from a committee. Three guys sitting in a row in this staff files suddenly become rivals in the president ial campaigns and for some reason since ive gone to school in new england i was named Deputy Campaign manager Alan Cranston for president and sent off to New Hampshire to fill auditoriums full of this wonderfully eccentric liberal older california senator. I had a wonderful education from stanford but i knew nothing about president ial campaigns in portsmouth New Hampshire. The lesson i learned the hard way after not getting the attendants i wanted at political events there they said cranston is going to come in second to mondale in iowa. He will get the big media boom. We will come to New Hampshire and we will have a packed auditorium and all the National Press and he will become the alternative to four more years of Carter Mondale and you are in charge of building the crowd. John lewis seminar about policy and nothing in the Foreign Relations committee for years. We looked around for the grownups to take over but it was me. What lesson did i learn . For me a little flip but its fun. How will i fill in auditorium and portsmouth and Shannon George mcgovern got to Alan Cranstons left. We did not come in second and we did not come third in iowa. I have it inflated price in japan the coming in the man who i loved and admired. For a packed auditorium in downtown portsmouth with all the National Press and i expected a very small crowd. So i troubled over the problem for a week and i worked with myers volunteers and finally i came up with the two words that save that event. We packed the hall. It was spillover out into the streets. Every veteran from the state of New Hampshire was out there and the chairman of the Veterans Committee on National Policy but i confess the two words on the flyer that were the key to the entire exercise were these. Free beer. [laughter] what was the easiest way . I think the easiest way that i learned stuff and frankly one of them most heartwarming and bipartisan was in traveling. Senator cranston is a member of the leadership to call up an air force read plain. We have a couple of their senators to go with us and he liked to fly around the world during congressional recesses. He said we can sleep at night on the airplane. It didnt work so well for me. As we traveled the world i realized the opportunity to engage with senators of the other party, remember chairman mo udall dealing cards on the floor of air force three saying this game is called. The chairman went in he would deal cards to all the staffers and we would lose carefully. The opportunity to work with senators from the other party with senior staffers from the other party made things very easy so when we came to a crucial moment ironically it was on the night of my birthday. The camera men man burst into a senate Conference Committee room and we had just cut a deal on the South African sanctions. One of the final nails in the coffin of the apartheid regime. All of the staffers are leaning overlooking in the pictures are on the web site. The deal that was cut was between two guys who had traveled together Richard Lugar of Indiana Republican Richard Nixons favorite mayor. But the republican senator worked with the democratic senator saying lets get something done. The easiest things occurred and we were working with the senator on the other side of the aisle who just wanted to get stuff done and that was the hope that i hold out for the future of the republicans. Thank you so much for being here. I would be delighted as i said to sign books until dawn. Dont crowd up at once but we are delighted to have you here and im personally very appreciated. Thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] nobody had written incredible book about fort myers and the addisons. I was the busy lawyer and i didnt have time to do that. I had some difficulties. I said i will write this book and while i was researching the book i was up in new jersey. I went to a warehouse where they had their original artifacts. I was in this warehouse and digging into a Cardboard Box full of original documents. I pulled out a handful and one of them fell on the ground. I reached over to pick it up and low in both hold it was a 16 page account of the edison ford trip to the everglades in 1914. What started out being a very nice day that led to mcgregor boulevard in fort myers, there were five cars, two cadillacs and three model ts. They had in their Company Three of the edison children madeline, Charles Edison and Theodore Edison and they also had henry ford and clara ford and edsel ford and several other friends. They went first to level and then from labelle over to a mockley and in the woods from their trip place called rock lake which was a very obscure place in the woods. They set up tents which they had already for this trip. One was reserved for the addisons and it was the tenth two lloyds and that attend for women and attend for the men. They had dinner that night out in the woods and all of a sudden myla, but ed since wyatt said everybody should go to their tent now and before she could finish her statement it started raining like you have never seen before. The conversation that went on in madelines account is just incredible. Madeline burke called and unusual Tropical Storm on rare occasions made life miserable in this part of the country. Like writers before the members of the expedition came one by one into the tent. This is the big tent. By the time the full fury of the storm arrived it contained everybody that but theater and the guys. We adore was later found wrapped in mosquito netting in a pool of water in the tent. He worked here every year. His last project which started in the mid20s was the rover project and the reason for that was he had had an experience during world war i of trying to get chemicals that they couldnt get because of oil for one being surrounded by a german uboats. He did that shortage to occur again so he also used rubber in the storage batteries that needed manufacturing and he knew the source for them. Firestone needed rubber for the tires. They use a lot of rubber in the basic automobile and because of all that they threw it together the Edison Research corp. The purpose was to find a new source of rubber from a vegetable that could be renewed and replanted every year and therefore if you had a cutoff from the sources of rubber you wouldnt be in trouble and that is what he was working for you. He really wasnt working to find a solution for rubber. He was working for the emergency brought on by his experience in world war i and the only sources we had for rubber back then were in the far east. Most of them were controlled by the japanese. Mirer wrote tons of personal letters and she described their marital difficulties, described what they were having for lunch and what they were having for supper and she wrote each one of her children. She wrote letters to her son charles saying i detest the people down here. I find this place to be rank. Sometime in the early 20s she did an aboutface. She had an epiphany and she became a part of the town as much as anybody in the town. She was involved in the plants guilt and the president of the plant guilds who said umbrella organizations for the garden clubs in the area. He always walked in the garden he was fond of sitting on the swings on the porches and to walk around. She liked to do that so we would do that. She loved to ride around and see things. She was interested in everything about what was going on in the town and around with different people. She was very curious about that and anything new that happened she wanted to know about it in order to be involved. She was very easy to know when to be with and as i said she was curious about everything and she wanted to know what was going on. We even went into the mall on broadway one night because she thought she wondered what was going on. Sidney took her and i was with them. Edison died in 1931. She came back in 1932 beer year after her husband died and when she was pulling out from the train she wrote a letter to sidney davis. It was extremely difficult to go to fort myers, one of the hardest things is not a hardest. In some ways he seemed very near to me, different from any other place. We are attached to those in fort myers in a different way from others. You Stephen Sestanovich former ambassador to the former soviet union under president clinton argues here that theres no such thing as a golden age of american Foreign Policy. He says since world war ii u. S. Foreign policy has been wavering uncertain and plagued by internal conflict much like today. This is just over an hour. Thank you very much and i have a lot of think use to say to people in this institution. Two married and her predecessors as dean, to my colleagues on the faculty especially those who read parts of the book and helped me improve it and to my students especially those who listened to me as i worked on it and thought about what i wanted to say. Im grateful to all of them. In this book i try to get my arms around american Foreign Policy since the start of the cold war in 1947. Now this is a big and not exactly unexamined time so i thought i might just say a couple of words about why i undertook it. Right now we are at one of those moments of american foreignpolicy debate that George Kennan described like a stone thrown into a beehive. That is with intense buzzing about what needs to be done with heightened controversy and awareness of the stakes of foreignpolicy and lots of fingerpointing and confusion in this kennan said nobody understands whats going on. To my mind, although at moments like this there is often a great deal of reaching back for historical analogies and president s in reality our past has become very remote from us. That history of american foreignpolicy because we idealize it. We think of it as a period which over decade since world war ii the United States led a successful and unified alliance, enjoy domestic consensus, pursued similar policies from one decade to the next enjoying sort of unimaginable success. Our precedence are discouraged to look back on this golden age. It seems so great but to my mind the past is actually relevant to the present because it was chaotic and confused and full of discord. Our alliances were regularly in crisis. The american domestic scene was full of intense recrimination and scapegoating about who was at fault for this or that calamity. Our policies have changed from administration to administration truman thought that roosevelt was on the wrong track. Eisenhower were thought truman was on the wrong track. Kennedy thought eisenhower was on the wrong track. Ronald reagan thought the last three president s before him had been losing the cold war and this pattern has continued. To me, that makes the past much more like the present. We are able to see our controversies about syria and ukraine in a more meaningful Historical Context if we understand what a mess the past was. I should say that i wanted to make this argument with as much vividness as i could in the book with color and drama and lively stories. I am assured an audience last week in california there is plenty of president ial profanity in the book. A woman came up to me afterwards and said it was that president ial profanity of mine that made me want to buy this. [laughter] so there are many different tastes. I felt in the course of writing at that perhaps i had gone too far when my editor called me up and said, why is the Prime Minister of Great Britain always bursting into tears on the phone with the president . He. Claimed this had happened six times. It wasnt that he was objecting. He just thought there needed to be more explanation for all these tiers. We established establish that really it was only twice that this was the Prime Minister of great Great Britain and for their occasions it was a hi liter of some other country. There are always hard feelings toward allies in american policymaking. I like to matt John Connolly for the classic description of American Attitudes toward he said in a congressional hearing gentleman the foreigners are trying to screw us. And i intend to screw them first. [laughter] so if the past is plenty messy to bear some similarity to our own times is it just as somebody once said of history one thing after another. I try not to tell the story that way. I try to impose some order on it and its as follows. I will give you the framework and then say a little bit that way of explanation and then we can talk about it. Over a sevenyear span almost since the end of world war ii it seems to me that american Foreign Policy has operated in two modes and what i call maximalist him and retrenchment. It seems to me they are very relevant still to understanding what make american foreignpolicy tech today and what the ingredients of success. Maximalist him and retrenchment. Each one is adopted when the previous policy is seen not to be working. One mode is essentially a policy
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