Transcripts For CSPAN2 Books By Hoover Institution Fellows 2

CSPAN2 Books By Hoover Institution Fellows July 12, 2024

Schultz, he talks about his book, issues on my mind. In the measures onio mind you talk when it comes to terrorism, we must think of moral involved if we must think of way of life, we must be willing to defend them. Means of more active defense and deterrence must be considered given the political support. If you have a Law Enforcement approach, you say, okay, let a terrorist act happen, then we find out who did it and we try them in the u. S. Courts and end lease appeal they go to jail. Well, what does that accomplish . A certain deterrence but in the meantime terrorist act is taking place and terrorist act like 9 11 can kill a lot of people. If you know something is coming at you, stop it from happening. In other words, prevention. I think when i first said that in 1984 it was controversial but after 9 11 people said, of course, we should be trying to stop that from happening and so trying to prevent things is very important and we do it a great deal in the country. I think theres been lots of terrorists acts that didnt happen because we found out about intelligence and prevented them. Former secretary of state, former secretary of labor, issues on my mind. What was your favorite job you ever had . Well, you say job. Job implies something that you have to do in order to get some money and if you say that i never had a job in my life. Ive always done things that i have found rewarding and interesting and if i ended up doing something that wasnt like that i would find Something Else to do but in government its a great privilege and opportunity to serve and i had a succession of jobs and all of them had tough moments but starting with 2 and a half years overseas in the United States marine corps and world war ii. There i was, i was fighting for my country and at the end we were victorious, i didnt have much to do with it. I was one person out there. I served in the Eisenhower Administration in economic advisers, it was a great privilege. I remember going down my office, was in this Big Office Building right next to the white house, used to be called the old state building, anyway, i had an office that looked the south lawn of the white house. I remember my father died not too long after that and he came and i took him to my office and he saw the view and he said, son, youve arrived. [laughter] so it was great to work there and you when youre working in the white house complex, you have a view of the whole government and i learned a lot about how you put the statistics together that we talk about all of the time. So that was a great experience. While i was secretary of labor, i had i knew the subject matter very well and i knew the department well because i had done things in both the kennedy and johnson administrations and gave me that exposure, but didnt know anything about washington and politics and the press and all of that, so i had a good base of knowledge from which to learn about these things and i was fortunate and persuading a man named joe to come and be the press person. Joe had worked in new york times, i dont know, decades and he was the premier labor reporter anywhere and he was really good, everybody read stories. Knew the subject and he said he would sign on but he had conditions. I said, okay, joe, what are your conditions . He said, first of all, if im going to be the spokesperson i have to foe whats going on. I dont want to be blindsided. If im blindsided, then im over and i said, of course, you go anywhere you want. Anybody would be glad to have you there, youll a contributor, what else, well, dont lie, i said come on, joe, i dont lie. Youll be surprised what happens to come, they come down here and they get under pressure, maybe they dont lie but mislead, misleading is bad as lying. So youve got to be straight. I said, okay. We will be straight. What else . Never have a press conference unless you have some news. I said, well, dont reporters like you dont understand. Reporters are guys who are trying to make a living and the way you make a living is you get a news story with your anymore on it and gets on the front page of your paper. You call a News Conference and the reporter thinks this is my story and he comes and you dont have any news, whats he going to do, hes going to ask you questions and try to make you Say Something stupid and thats the news. So he had a whole bunch of things like that. I learn a lot about the press from joe and while sometimes people write things you dont like on the whole, constructive attitude and you help them get the facts straight, you are going to be much better off. Then i had, there was a guy name bryce harlow in the white house who was political counselor and congressional relations guy and he took me under his wing to a certain extent and he had rules. He said never make a promise unless you can deliver on it. If it tushes out its turns out its hard to deliver, try all the harder because people only deal with you if they trust you and they trust you if you do you say youre going to do and his word is trust is the coin to have realm, trust is the coin of the realm so i always tried to remember that. In the Labor Department i had some big my first big battle in the congress and i learned something about that. Theres a great learning thing. Then i went there to be the director of the budget and then you have the whole government out in front of you, so that was great, then i became secretary of the treasury. There was a time when we were we readied the International Monetary system. Lots of dealings with people all over the world and i learned a lot about how to do Something Internationally. So that was great experience for me. It was fun, i enjoyed. Enjoyed the people. Some are still good friends today, but, of course, when i was secretary of state, plates changed. When Ronald Reagan took office the cold war was as cold as it would get and when we left it was left but the shouting. That was a huge thing to watch unfold. Mr. Secretary, if your book, issues on my mind, you have rules for leadership and a couple of those youve already expounded on, bryce harlow rule and joe loftus rule, your first role is to be a participant . Oh, yeah, thats what democracy is all about. Early on when i was working with him in primaries Ronald Reagan gave me a tie and in the tie said democracy is not a spectator sport and be part of politics and be willing to serve and be a participant. Rule number 5, competence is the name of the game in leadership. Well, its a great start to be competent. If youre not competent, youre going to get in big trouble. I had a tough experience, i told you when i went to washington as secretary of labor i was kind of innocent of politics and had political appointees slots to fill and i realized that you are trying to work with a diverge constituency and i said i need the best management guy in this industrial relations, everybody told me a guy named jim hudson, and then i talked to him. I said, well, we have to have a real labor guy, not a lawyer but someone who negotiates, stands for election, union guy, so we found a guy named bill. We have to get somebody who knows manpower training and so we got that, we have to get somebody who has worked in the area of how to deal with discrimination in the workplace and so on, a lawyer who know it is labor market, anyway, i get a lot of the people lined up and president president elect nixon thought it would show progress in his administration so he said why dont you bring him to the hotel and we will have a meeting and take him to introduce him to the press and i introduce jim hudson and asked him all kinds of questions and pretty obvious that he was a real pro and knew what he was doing. Some guy in the back raises hand, mr. Hudson, are you a democrat or a republican, i never even asked him. He says im a democrat. Next i remember weber who is dazzling and he just same guy holds his hand up, im a democrat. The last guy was jeff moore who is our nominee to be head of the Bureau Statistics and he was statistician and statistician and arthur who was close to nixon, something he wanted and i wanted, finally, we have a republican. So the same guy asked the question and he stands there like a couch and he finally says, well, i guess you to say im an independent. Anyway, i get back to my hotel room, phone is ringing off the hook and republicans on the Senate Labor Committee are saying dont you know that there was an election and so on. I cleared the names in the white house and i cleared them with ranking remember jacob javits, but anyway, i will give them credit because all my guys did terrific, they were competent people and even some of the people who oned called me and said, you know, we like your guys and jim hudson succeeded me as secretary of labor and later became ambassador of japan. So if i had ruled all of the people out because they were registered democrats, i wouldnt have had the competence. I should have asked the question and done something about it but anyway, if you have competent people around you, youre going to do much better than if you dont. Your first job is to form your team and get people who are competent in those slots. George schultz was one of several Hoover Institution authors that we interviewed in 2013, you can find them all in our website, up next soon to be director of Hoover Institute condoleezza rice. In the Reagan Library in 2017 she talks about her book, democracy, stories from the long road to freedom. When i think about democracy, its actually kind of mysterious things that people are willing to trust these abstractions, constitution, rule of law, willing to go to the polls and elect people to represent them rather than going into the streets or rather than binding to family or to clan or to religion, they trust constitutions and rule of law and thats a very mysterious process and i think as a kid, as a child in birmingham, alabama i saw something more mysterious, you couldnt go to Movie Theater or restaurant if you were a black person and most certainly secondclass citizen. I saw black citizens absolutely devoted to institutions of american democracy. I have one incident in the book that encapsulates it for me and i was 6ish years old and my uncle, my mothers brother had picked me up from school and it was election day and there were long lines of black people waiting to vote and i said to my uncle, well, this must mean that that man wallace, George Wallace cant win. I knew that we didnt want him to win. My uncle said, oh no, we are a minority, so hes going to win. I looked at my uncle and i said, then why do they bother and my uncle said because they know that one day that vote will matter and as i went around the world as secretary of state and i saw long lines of liberians or afghans, iraqis, south africans, in latin america people voting sometime for the first time i thought to myself one day they know the vote will matter and we are blessed with this extraordinary gift, democracy, americans in particular are blessed with Founding Fathers who understood an institutional design that would protect our liberties, our right to say what we think, to worship as we please, to be free from the police at night and have dignities that come with having those who will govern, i have to ask for your consent, but if we were blessed with that and we believe that we were endowed by our creator with those rights, it cant be true for us and not for them and one of the marvelous legacies of the United States of america and the building in which we sit, the library, one of the most marvelous legacies of Ronald Reagan was that he never forgot our obligation to speak for the voiceless. He never forgot our obligation to do the right thing in supporting those who just wanting the simple freedoms that we had and he delivered because he believed that the United States of america, america is an idea and its an idea thats universal and so thats why i wanted to write this book. [applause] you were in the position to move the worlds opinion of the United States and actions better than any other american, im sure. I know youre not in office now and just over 100 days since weve had the Trump Administration empowered and i wonder if youre able to speak to and if theres been any change in your mind as to how americans are viewed as we transition from president obama to President Trump . Well, i was in europe not too long after the election and the first thing i said to all of my friends, settle down. The United States of america is engaged in democratic experiment. [laughter] we just elected somebody who has never been in government before who has never even sniffed the government before, and that president is going to take some time, a bit of a learning curve but the one thing that america has institutions that are absolutely firm and absolutely concrete and will hold america and if you look at the president , i think hes getting used to the fact that actually its not as easy as it looks in there. That the american presidency is not just one person, its an institution, its a constrained institutions. The Founding Fathers were very, very terrified of executive power. If they were leaving a king, they didnt want to create another one. They created a congress, two houses as a separate and equal branch of government. Its article 1 of the constitution as the congress will constantly remind you when youre in the executive branch and today congress is made up of 535 people most of whom think they should be president of the United States. He has cohorts which he learned will challenge the president , he has governors, 50 of them, half of whom think they should be president of the United States and they have legislators and by the way he has a press as well, Civil Society and americans who are ungovernable. [laughter] so the job of getting to be president is is one thing, once youre there its quite another, the learning curve has been steep but i think we see some things that the world likes in what they see in america and i think the decision to strike the syrian air bases after the chemical weapons attack by assad on his own people was a very important corrective. We had layed out a red line 4 or 25 years ago, its been crossed and we have done nothing. That eroded american credibility and in that single strike the administration said this far and no further. There are just some things that are intolerable and i saw Something Else too in the way the president did that. You remember he said, i couldnt sit by and watch babies choking on chemical gas, what he was really saying as president of the United States i cannot sit by and watch baby chokes on chemical gas and so i think that, you know, still a lot of water to pass onto that bridge and we are still learning in many, many ways what its like to get up and not just react every time, but some very good things have happened and the one thing i will say as an american we have only one president at a time, and we have to do everything we can to try to make our president successful and thats where i stand. [applause] very large percent of our audience here might think some in the left and the right too that its waste of tax dollars and why would we be putting money in foreign aid because our schools needs to be prepared, bridges and all of that. Question coming from former secretary of state, do you think theres a foreign aid argument thats, you know, thats really important for the American People to grasp . Yeah. Well, for me its the same argument that i would make about democracy and promoting democracy. You can say we will Pay Attention to our own knitting, own affairs, we have to rebuild our bridges, rebuild our bridges in philadelphia, why are we building bridges in afghanistan. You can say our schools are not in great shape, why are we trying to send girls to school in nigeria, you can say all of those things, but i think theres really two powerful arguments against that kind of thinking, one is a moral argument and one is a practical argument. The moral argument is this, america is an idea and if life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are universal and are good for us and cant be good for us and not for them, and we are at our best when we lead from both power and principle. Now, the principle that no man, woman or child should have to live in, the dires of poverty and worst of circumstances because we are also a compassionate nation that actually believes that as many problems as we have, we have been given an extraordinary bounty. If you go to some of the places in the world, i dont care how bad it looks in the United States of america, its much, much worse, how can you turn a blind eye to those children playing in the dirt in haiti and how can you turn a blind eye to an ebola pandemic in liberia . We are too good to be that way and the moral argument is that i am christian and i have been told that what you do for the least of my brothers you do for me and whatever your tradition is and wherever that impulse comes from for compassion america has had it and we have to keep it. Thats the moral case and now the practical states. Democratic states that can deliver for their own people dont invade their neighbors, they dont traffic children and sex trade so women end up in brothels and they dont democracies dont fight each other, we know that. And so theres a reason that we have believed that we are better off when other people beyond our borders can live with decent governments to try to take care of them. Yes, i think there was a time where foreign aid was just given for strategic reasons, soviet union was giving money and we gave money to somebody else, guilt of colonialism or whatever, the days have actually been long gone for a long time and if you look at some of the foreign aid programs that we now run, the millennium c

© 2025 Vimarsana