Are you serious. But if you were to ask if you can list your thoughts on the way here. It comes out really easily. Youre actually seen a saying a lot about you. That is what comes out the margins. Tonight it will air on cspan at 8 00 p. M. Eastern time. This week on q a the former secretary of defense robert gates he discusses the book the passion for leadership on change and reform for 50 years of public service. Robert gates in the house on Foreign Relations recently have a column that the next president of the United States was on the top for leadership. What would you want the next president to take away from your book on leadership. I think surrounding himself or her self with really strong capable independent minded people empowering them and delegating authority to them and holding them accountable if they are successful reward them in whatever way they can and if they fail fire them i think that too much of what we always think about just the president and the reality is the best president s in the greatest president s had been willing to recognize they werent the smartest person in the room and to surround themselves with people they thought were smarter than them. In lincoln and both roosevelt and truman and eisenhower and reagan were all really to bring strong people into their cabinets listen to them integrate their views with their own they didnt mind if that person disagreed with them and expected candid advice from them. I think that is really Important Message for a president. It is really your life on the screen and it starts in wichita kansas in 1943 what im looking for as we go through this for you to tell us at what point you started thinking about leadership you have your ba from william and mary. The cia started in 1996. National Security Council 7479. And you are nominated but withdrew as cia director and 87. Here the national Security Council. And then we have cia director back in 1991 when you were confirmed. You did Academic Work speaking and then you were the interim dean of the dean of the George Bush School of government and 99 for a couple of years. President of texas a and m. Defense secretary. Where along the way did you learn the Different Things in this book. I write in the last chapter of the book that my First Leadership position was as a patrol leader and Boy Scout Troop 522. I write that nothing teaches you leadership skills like being in charge of a bunch of 11, 12 and 13 years old and trying to get them to do what they dont want to do and you cant make them do it and youre only a year or two older than they are. And then 15 i have the old and the only formal training i ever had that was at film out scott ranch. That was my last formal training in leadership but as i say in the book i had been learning for 55 years ever since then. I dont think that ive always had from my very first day at cia a desire ive always have a feeling of how things could be made better and i dont know if i would articulate it as wanting to take leadership but i saw where a Good Organization could be made better. And broke my first essay on how we could improve soviet analysis when i had been on active duty at the Agency Agency for two years. Im sure my superiors were unimpressed but i felt that way about each organization that ive led and i say in the book i love them all. I always thought they could be better than they were. Ive always been somebody who is pressing for change into make improvements and really from the earliest days. You tell the story in the book the confrontation you head with rick. Texas. When i became the finalist for president of texas a m he called me and basically tried to push me to withdraw my candidacy and ive always heard that he promised the job to someone else. Have taught at a m for about ten years i think. I finally just told him and he said he was going to appoint all of the regions it was i can be pleasant for me if i decided to take the job. I said ive heard a lot of them didnt want me to come and i just let the board of regents make that decision. I later told my wife what i had been going through with my mind at the time i had been facing off with the Deputy Director of the kgb when he was first elected to the texas house and if he thought he could intimidate me he was sadly mistaken. What impact did that have on you. He did go ahead and appoint those. Six of the nine regions had been regents had been appointed by george w. Bush at that time so five of those voted for me. His three appointees voted against me and one courageous soul obscene. He and i maintained outward stability i think most people didnt know that we didnt have a great relationship and i will say this while i was there he mostly left me alone. He tried to force me into hiring a friend of his the Vice President for student affairs. I have artie extended the offer to someone. And i refuse to do it. The next board of regents meeting they changed the rules to make it so that the board of regents had to approve any such appointment in the future. You make a point about senator bob byrd in your relationship with him. He was a very interesting guy he was always very friendly to me i remember one story one time he was referred to by the Washington Post and others as the king of pork and he was pretty good at taking federal money home to West Virginia. Just about everybody everything i say is named for him. They wrote an editorial complaining that they have decided to build a billiondollar logistics facility in the basic thrust was that he had forced them to build in West Virginia. I knew for a fact that cia knew the only way they could get the money for the facility was if they built in West Virginia and he helped them. It was cias initiatives not senator byrds. The story ran and i was director of cia at the time i called him up i said would it be alright if i wrote a letter to the editor. Seen that the story was on and setting of the facts right. I will never forget there was a long pause he said you would do that for me i said its only fair and those are the facts. I wrote the letter and post publish it. And i called him the day it appeared just to make sure he sought in the senator of oklahoma who was also close to him told me after that pretty much anytime my name came up he would say that mister gates is an honorable man. What was a lesson . First of all people forget people remember slates and insults but i think what they dont understand in Washington Well enough today as they also remember kindnesses. They remember treating people decently and that people who are on the receiving and never forget it. And i think too much emphasis is placed on negative relationships when in fact there are lots of opportunities daytoday where you can do the right thing by someone may be a small thing maybe somebody works for you or somebody you work for and they wont forget it. We started this program in the same format 27 years ago. And heres something ive never seen i want to put on the screen. Its a picture from the book and we have the word sag circle. When you would normally had that. Hundreds of times why. I tried to balance it. First of all its 2016. There are a lot of women in leadership positions who are about to assume leadership positions i wanted to make clear particularly the young people that these leadership opportunities are going to be open for everybody and that they apply regardless of your gender. Did anyone comment on it since the book was out . They used the word throughout the workbook. A sergeant by the name of i wanted to find out what that point was all about. One of the points that i made at the beginning of the conversation was the importance of empowering subordinates and getting them responsibility. So Sergeant Easton worked in my outer office in the reception area in my senior military assistance decided there would be value in allowing these young men to participate in my overseas trips by doing advance work by going there ahead of me and helping to prepare my visit including in iraq and afghanistan. So he sent Sergeant Easton out to do do that work. And he was meeting with a kernel who have his own ideas about what he wanted me to do mainly of the at the colonel wanted me to sit and watch a bunch of powerpoint briefings. And he knew from me directly that i wanted to spend time with the troops and so he and the colonel went back and forth a little bit and one had a full eagle on his shoulder and the other one had some stripes and finally jason walked over to the colonels desk and he picked up the phone he said one of the two of us can call the secretary of defense and have the call taken immediately and the colonel smiled and he said i get your point he did it jason the way. When you were testifying for the Confirmation Committee for the cia director you have this clip with your relationship with senator metzenbaum. I want you to tell what this point was about. What and bother me from the inception bothers me now. Whether you are leveling with us whether you were trying to gild the lily a little bit. Did you get that. He couldve answered could have answered our questions. But you didnt do that. I have difficulty with that. At times they were asking me what i thought mister north have been referring to when he would write something and thats where i would answer that i did not know it was far for me to know what was in his office. It was a long hearing they were testifying at that time for about ten straight hours and a big part of testifying on the hill is not answering the question but figuring out what the question is because so often the member of congress is making a speech i remember the senator at one point read a very long and complicated page and i was just exhausted and lost the bubble i couldnt figure out what the question must and i said with all due respect senator im tired whats the question and he didnt know what the question was an 18 came up and sat down and they were going through and another aide came he ended up reading the whole thing over again i found the question in their that i thought i could answer but testifying in front of congress is always an interesting experience. He spent two years in the service and as we saw a lot of years in this town. What you think of congress . The thing that concerns me is that its changed so much since i first came to washington 50 years ago when i came to washington and i will use the senate as an example because i remember the names better our politics has always been poor i came to washington in 1976 so we were in the middle of the vietnam war. Within half a dozen years we would be involved in watergate so things had never and smooth here in washington but there were always on the hell a number of people both democrats and republicans who would reach across the aisle to get business done. They would pass appropriation bills to pass welfare reform to pass legislation that moved the country forward. And i called that body of people the Bridge Builders they were building bridges across the aisle. In the sad thing is nearly all of those people are gone the bill bradleys the jack dan fourth. They were probably two dozen or more senators who were in that category you can actually get things done and the Committee Chairs had Real Authority and when they committed to do something it would get done. And most of those people are gone they didnt get defeated for the most part they just got frustrated and fed up and left on their own accord. A good example of this is a 1994 i got a call from david warren and hed been offered the presidency of the university of oklahoma and he was wrestling with brother to lead leave the senate and take this. Finally i said at the end of the conversation i think its very easy when youre daydreaming on a plane or your driving are you daydreaming about what you can accomplish in the u. S. Senate or what you can accomplish at ou and he laughed and he said youre right. He took the ou job. I think this is my concern that its not just the politics are polarized its that the people who had in the past been able to come together and move forward so many of them are gone and so if you are left into good example of this is the absence for years of regular Appropriations Bills just something simple as funding the government from year to year. Under the last ten years only to years had they have and enacted appropriation at the beginning of the fiscal year and that i was nine and ten years ago. So for the last eight years we had have continuing resolutions or sequestration but no regular order of business one of the biggest planes ever built in the United States and you point out in your book that you wanted to retire some of this its a very big plane in congress didnt want to do it the air force wants to retire it because it eats money and they have some of these original c5 as they require an enormous amount of money to maintain and some of them never fly they will drag them around the tarmac at the air force base said that the wheels dont go flat thats the only time they ever move but because they are a part of National Guard units or air National Guard units members of congress in which they are located wont let them be decommissioned matter how much money they cost the air force and they cant perform any kind of mission at all. How often does this happen the recent testimony you have the leadership of the pentagon telling the congress that they have 24 of the facilities the military has in the u. S. Are access to need but the Congress Wont let the military shut them down and say that overhead what is a solution to that . I think its whether you have one of the long drawn out you point at the commission to look at military facilities and then you present the congress with an upanddown vote on a list basis it takes years and its very expensive. My view is the congress ought to authorize the secretary of defense to be able to close the facilities when the service will testify. When i was secretary in 2009 most of my predecessors canceled if they were lucky one or two or three major procurements. When dick cheney was secretary under the first senator busch. Senator bush. He canceled the a 12 fighter and that was a 1992. And maybe 91 and the litigation for that ended just two years ago and it was owned by the marines which of course is still flying. Congress would not let him kill it. I cut 36 programs they built out the completion and they wouldve cost the taxpayers about 300 30 billion. I got 33 of them approved by congress in the first year and i got the rest the following year. Partly it was i involved that. These were very important programs most of them. The services have fought for them but i involved the Service Leadership in all of these decisions we have many meetings. We the opportunity to make their own suggestions it was no longer needed. Sometimes they put them in their budget because they knew if they didnt the congress what so they just conceded the matter. Leave the politics to me. But then i announced because i have all of the Service Chiefs on board none of them leaked and none of them went to the hell behind my back to try to get the congress to reserve those decisions. I publicly announced all of these cuts will congress is out of town and i had two weeks before they came back on a really strong on the ground swell of public support for what ive done in the media and elsewhere. When i arrived back in town. There was so many of these programs it was hard for them to make deals with each other like they always use to i have the threat of a very strong threat of a veto if they put things and they didnt want. It ultimately is productive. I think one of the things about my book, duty, that surprised a lot of people was how negative i was towards the congress toward the congress because i had have a very productive relationship with them and very cooperative so i think i just exercise at that enormous amounts of soft discipline. The whole time i have a job. I will say in the last two or three months my discipline began to slip a little and there were a couple of occasions when i got pretty sharp on the hell and i was probably her of the reason i knew it was time to leave. One of the things you talked about the book was fired people. I want to go back 2007 this is you announcing the resignation. I want to talk about that in the idea of letting them resign. Lets watch this. I had two announcements to make. First earlier today the secretary of the army offered his resignation i have accepted his resignation. Under secretary of the army the acting secretary until a new secretary is in place. I think dr. Harvey for his distinguished service to the department into the nation. Second, later today the army will name a new permanent commander for the walter reed medical center. It must have its new leadership in place as quickly as possible. I have disappointed that some in the army had not appreciated the seriousness of the situation pertaining to Outpatient Care some have shown too much defensiveness and have not shown enough focus on digging in to addressing the problems. As you know you have acknowledged that some people think youre you are cold when it comes to firing explain your philosophy of firing someone. As part of my view of improving organizations i am willing to hold people accountable and i think that even when i was at young cia officer whenever there was a problem and always seemed like the people low down on the totem pole were the ones that got punished and superiors who should have known about the problem and should have dealt with the problem escaped unscathed. I told myself then this is back in the 70s that if i were ever in a position of authority that was not the way it was going to be. I was gonna go out of my way to find a scapegoat or something but if i came to the conclusion that someone had not taken the problem seriously enough or have made a big mistake that th