Now Condoleezza Rice on democracy. [inaudible conversations] [applause] and actor price is going to be interviewed for us by one of the best interviewers i know who has his own show on bloomberg or National Book festival cochair and very generous supporter mr. David rubenstein. [applause] please welcome both of them. Plea [applause] and thanks, and enjoy. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much or having me here and welcome everybody. Yo thanks for being here. Its a great event, great event. [applause] its hard to believe but youve now been out of government for about nine years bo so before we get into your new book on democracy which i highly recommend that we will talk about it tell us what you been doing since he left government other than writing three a selling books, this is the third but other than that you were teaching at stanford and what ozzy doing . Ive gone back to what i consider to be my real profession are they had thatat digression in washington. I started as an assistantstart professor and so i have returned to stanford. My appointment, this is a Business School but i teach business classes and undergraduates. I teach a course in American Foreign policy. Ive been able to do a little bit of work in the private sector a little consulting the private sector and im spending a lot more time practicing the piano than i did when i was in the government because thats really a great love. Im trying to improve my golf handicap. Thats a lot harder than playing the piano. Speaking of your golf handicap you were one of ther re first two women to be elected to the Augusta National golf club so was that an honor you ever expected you would get . I was stunned. In fact a good friend who is the member of augusta came up to tell me that i was being invited to join augusta i just sat there dumbfounded and he said you are going to say yes, right . I said yes, i am but i was completely taken by surprise. I wont tell anybody but what is your handicap . Well its not really a state secret. For those of you who are golfers there something called an index and you take that index and you go to different courses and depending on the difficulty of the course you establish a handicap. My index is 11. 6 which means on most courses im about a 13 or 14 handicap. [applause] did you ever play with president george w. Bush . Ive played with president george w. Bush on a number of occasions. He plays really fast. You almost have to run to your golf ball to keep up with him but yes we played together. In music you did trained to be a classical musical pianistf and ive seen you perform with yoyo ma among others so do you do a lot of those concerts anymore . I do at least one concert a year. Rnatio was fortunate to play with yoyo ma at his Music Festival at the Kennedy Center for which you are such a great leader david. D. At least once a year i have a concert with a professional quartet from boston university. We do a benefit for a charity that we started called classics for kids that puts a musical instance in the schools. I believe like everybody that we need s. T. E. M. , Science Technology and mathematics but im also a great believer that we need the arts. Our kids need to be closer to the arts. [applause] i want to focus on your book but some people may not know you did a biography. You were born and grew up in birmingham and it was a segregated south and the jim crow laws. When you were growing up howu. Long did it take before you realize you were not treated the same as everybody else. It was most segregated big city in the country at the time. It was a place where the Police Commissioner paul connor was wellknown for brutality towards blacks and it didnt take long to know that your parents were a little embarrassed to take you to a restaurant or Movie Theater they were never people who let the phoc community that i grew up in which was mostly schoolteachers. My parents are educators they never let this feel in any waywh like victims. Ctim. They said when you consider yourself a victim me of loss control so dont consider yourself a victim. They also said youre going to have to be twice as good. They didnt say that as a matter of debate. They set it as a matter of fact. Education was supposed to be your armor against it. But i remember the very first time it really came home to me. You know how works you take a kid and santa claus puts the kid on the knee and ask what you want for christmas . This particular santa claus was taking a white kid in sitting him on his knee and my father who was a former football player. My dad was 6 feet 3 inches, 240 he said to my mother angie if he does that to condoleezza and going to pull that stuff off of him and expose them as the cracker that he is. [laughter] theres this little girl and you are five and its santa claus, daddy, how is going to end that . Santa claus must have read my fathers body language because when he came to me you put me on his knee and he said little girl what would you like for the f christmas . I remember that was the first time that i thought this is really terrible and santa claus of all things. One of the things that may been unusual in your upbringing as you had an unusual first name where did that name come from . So condoleezza is my mothers attempted angle if i which in italian means with weakness. Maybe she missed the vote there but thats what it meant. Her name was angelina and a half in and chemawa but i think she wanted an italian name page youu thought about on dante pettis and walking slowly and that wasnt so good. Allegro med fast and that definitely wasnt good. D. So she came up with it. Your parents move at a a birmingham and moved to denver and you ultimately went to school at the university of denver for your graduated phi beta kappa. Then you went to notre dame but it didnt get involved in football cheering or anythinge reviewer graduate student. Nt i love folk all, are you kidding . Of course i went to the football games. You impacted then bring that hd and then you went to stanford thats correct. Her specialty was soviet. I was a failed music major. I started in college as a piano major. I studied piano from each of three. My grandmother taught piano so i learned very young and at the end of my sophomore year in college i went to the austin Music Festival school and i metg met i thought im about too end up playing piano bar someplace. I took a class in international politics. All of a sudden i knew what i wanted to be. T, i wanted to do eastern diplomacy and that took me then into International Policy because tha major ultimately was a degree. Madeleine albright tells the story that her father once said his favorite student with you and she was surprised that you had been a student and she hadnt known that. Ultimately you got involved in the George Herbert walker Bush Administration counsel staff. Yes. Its a really important storyoms because there is this notion sod that you have i got there on my own. Nobody gets there on their own. Theres always somebody advocating for you, working for you and for me Brent Scowcroft who i had been National Security adviser since gerald ford came up to give a talk. I was the secondyear professor at stanford. He got to know me and said i want to get to know you better. I like your work and i was sort of getting my not for my work on soviet military involvement. He started taking me to the Strategy Group and he really mentored me into the field. I often say theres another lesson in that you also say you have to have role models and mentors who look like you. Its great if you do but if isot waited for lack female role model and still be waiting. Instead my role model is going to be my mentors were white men. Those were the people who dominated my field. I always tell my students now your mentors are people who believe in you and see things in you that you dont necessarily see in yourself. Said he hoped to get a job under bush 41 . When george h. W. Bush was elected he asked brent, he called me and he said this is 1988 remember gorbachev is doing some interesting things in the soviet union. The president will need someone to help them sorted out. As a result i got to be a white house specialist at the end of the cold war. And you speak russian . R i do speak russian. After that administration wasswb over he went back to denver and then when george w. Bush was running for president how did you get involved with that . I was provost at the university which is the chief operating officer of the university and a very happy academic but george h. W. Bush called me one day and he said you know my son is the governor of texas and thinking about running for president. They spent a couple of days with them and after a while he asked me to organize his foreignpolicy campaign. Thats how i got involved with george w. Bush. Were you surprised he asked you to be National Security officer at the beginning of that administration . By the time he got his election i figured id go into administration and National Security adviser had been on tho National Security council. How many women had served as National Security adviser before you . None. [applause] lets talk about this book, democracy. Why did she compelled feel compelled to write a book about democracy . In many ways i wanted to write this book for a long time because it is in some ways an expression of my own life. I am a Firm Believer that there is no other system that accords the kind of dignity that human beings crave to be able to be free to say what you think and worship as you please and most importantly to have too governed without consent. Growing up in segregated earning him where my parents were half citizens and fundamentally believed in this american democracy. I relate one book. I was with my uncle aldo and he picked me up at school on election day in alabama. I was six years old or so andi then you and my own 6yearold way that this man George Wallace was not good for black people. There were long long lines of people going in to vote and it was segregated of course. I said to my uncle while all these people vote. That George Wallace man cant possibly win and my uncle said oh no we are a minority or George Wallace is going to win anyway. I said to him so why do they bother . And he said because they know that one day that vote will matter. I never forgot that. I thought as i wrote this book of the extraordinary story of the United States of america the constitution that was given to america by its founders, the words about equality and yet a country born with slavery but how the same constitution that had once counted in the compromise my ancestors were threefifths of a man with a the same constitution that would take the oath as the 66th secretary of state under the portrait of Benjamin Franklin borne by a jewish woman Ruth Bader Ginsburg and thats the story of democracy. [applause] you point out in the book that you are africanamerican but actually 40 of your bloodline is white. Is as 40 of my bloodline is european. And 10 is asian. Something, other. Some other. The young girls were killed in the bombing were they people that you knew . Absolutely. Ly the the community was pretty small and one of the four girls killed in the Baptist Church and 53 had been in my fathers kindergarten. Id gone to kindergarten with her. Theres a picture of my father giving her kindergarten diploma. Her father was the photographer at everybodys wedding and birthday parties. Addy mae collins had been in my uncles homeroom. I remember him saying that monday when they put out to school he looked at her and just cried. When that happened did your family say we should move out of here . No. You remember the first time seeing in my parents eyes but they could do to protect me but know we stayed there. Birmingham again to change. Again its a story of democracy. That same constitution would be used by the naacp and Thurgood Marshall and others going all the way back and its tomorrow report from 1937. G they would decide what they were going to take to try and break down segregation and inequality. That would eventually end up in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965 and the first time my parents and i could go for restaurant. Two days after the Civil Rights Act passed my father said lets go to dinner. We got all dressed up and we went to this hotel for dinner. I remember the people sort of looking up from their food and realizing now was okay to have dinner. In your book you point out we have slavery but when slavery was ended in 1865 we had jim crow laws so how do you as an africanamerican woman rationalized what our country did and the civil rights amendments that occurred in the constitution. Went to 100 years of how dodo you say democracy is such a wonderful system . How do you rationalize that . Because there is no perfect ever and yet because of the institutions that we weree bequeathed, the constitutionss and the courts independent judiciary slowly but surely the rights of the descendents ofli slaves would be one through those very institutions. When Martin Luther king ander k others and Dorothy Height who was a very mentor of mine and the only real women among those great civil rights leaders they werent asking america to be something else. There were asking america to be what you say you are. When you have is a situation someplace and you appeal to the decision. In any system the bringing of rights to people is a difficult and sticky and hard process. It was extremely hard and i think we have done better than i can think of anyplace in the world has done it. Accomp today youre a very accomplished person you are very famous. Do you feel discrimination anywhere in the world and anyway you feel you are discriminated against . Profess i always face sometimes you are treated badly because of your race or your gender its your fault not theirs . Know, it feels very strongly that im able to achieve what i want to achieve and i try to tell my students its the samemy way. Its what my parents said if you consider yourself a victim and somebody else has control of your life. We all know that there is inequality in our society and we know that our Great National myth it doesnt matter where you came from, matters where youre going. You can come from humble circumstances and you can do great things that isnt true for all of us. Our goal, our job as citizens oo democracy is to demand that these institutions that they deliver on that promise and not shun them because they are still the best option for getting there. Did your parents with to see your Great Success as a professional . I lost my mother very young. My mother was only 61 years old. I was 30 when she died but she did get to see me as professor at stanford. Before she died he gave her my very first book which is on the news york times seller. It was called the check was off army and it was my dissertation. If you havent noticed neither of those exist anymore. I gave her the book. My father knew that i became National Security adviser. Rtly w he died shortly after. Im an only child. And the pressure of being an only child. Thats why im a sports fanatic. That was my fathers passion and the music fanatic because that was my mothers passion. N. Lets talk about democracy around the rest of the world. N the United States has democracy and is not perfect. You talk about the soviet union and russia. Bj you point out a couple of times democracy broke out in russialse after the revolution and lost power perhaps. Why did democracy in both casesr disappear after gorbachev lost our . One thing i do in this booki. Is submit one of the explanations you sometimes get t about russia. Like the rushes dont have the dna for democracy. I believe there any people in the face of the earth who arent capable of democracy and david you know that we have huge cultural arguments. The germans were supposed to be marshals for democracy predations were but of coursw you got south korea and youve got japan. The africans they were to travel but of course you got botswana and you have kenya who is going pretentious thing. I cannot democracy. Of course now there is brazil and chile and columbia and by the way africanamericans were too childlike. Of course we have had a black president and a black attorney general and attorneys general and the black secretary of state. E. I reject the dash and with the russians to get it all the time. They like strongman that really what the story is, this story of the failure of institutions to take hold under enormous pressure. If you think about the collapse of the soviet union and to think about the effort to build capitalism 50 of the russian population fell into poverty practically overnight. The country broke apart overnight and unfortunately their first president bush yeltsin who i admired for a lot of reasons, instead ofof strengthening the institutions and working through them he starts to rule by the creed. He weakens the legislature weakens independent web judiciary. That strong presence and her poor self is one thing. When Vladimir Putin becomes present that same strong presidency is now on the pants of someone with authoritarian instincts. The russian failure is the importance of institution. Deep down you dont see putin as a jeffersonian democrat . I dont think you would confuse him with that. I know him pretty well. Does he speak english . He was learning english by the time he came into a thin now i understand its possible but i would chitchat with him in russian. He really kind of like me at the beginning i think but i remember once sitt