Ferguson, former george w. Bush Administration Justice from an official john you and awardwinning author shall be steel it up first, here is a portion of a 2013 interview with George Scholz, secretary of state during the reagan administration. He talked about his book, issues on my mind. And issues on my mind you right when it comes to terrorism we in this country must think hard about the moral stakes involved if we truly believe in our Democratic Values and our way of life, we must be willing to defend them. Passive measures are unlikely to suffice and means a more active defense and deterrence must be considered and given the necessary political support. Well, you say if you have a Law Enforcement approach, you say, okay, let a terrorist act happen and then we find out who did it and then we try them in a u. S. Court and if we make them guilty with their endless appeals they go to jail. Well, what does that accomplish . A certain deterrent but in the meantime the terrorist act has taken place and a terrorist act like 911 can kill a lot of people. If you know something is coming at you why not stop it from happening . In other words, prevention and i think when i first said that in 1984 it was very controversial but after 911 people have said of course, we should be trying to stop that from happening. So i think this doctrine of trying to prevent things is very important and it has become common and we do it a great deal in this country and i think there have been lots of terrorists acts that cannot happen because we found out about them through intelligence and prevented them. Were talking with former secretary of state, secretary of labor, former secretary of the treasury George Scholz about his new book, issues on my mind. Mr. Secretary, what was your favorite job you ever had . Use a job but job implies something that you have to do in order to get money. 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 want up doing something that wasnt like that i would find Something Else to do. But in government it is a great privilege and opportunity to serve and i had a succession of jobs and all of them had their tough moments but all of them were rewording starting with my two and half years overseas in the United States marine corps in world war ii. There i was fighting for my country and in the end we were victorious and i did not have much to do with it but i was one person out there. I served in the Eisenhower Administration as his council of economic advisors and it was a great privilege and i remember going down my office was in this Big Office Building right next to the white house and used to be called the old state building and anyway, i had an office with a window that looked out on the south lawn of the white house and i remember my father who died not too long after that but he came in i took him to my office and he saw this view and he said son, you have arrived. [laughter] so, it was great to work there and when you are 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 and we talk about all the time so that was a great experience. But when i was secretary of labor i had, i knew the subject matter very well and i knew the department well because i had done some things in both the kennedy and johnson administrations and it gave me that exposure but i did not 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 in persuading amand name joe loftus to come and be the press person and show had worked the New York Times for, i dont know, decades and he was the premier labor reporter anywhere and he was really good and everybody read his stories. He really knew his subject. He said he would sign on but he had conditions. I said okay joe, what are your conditions and he said well, first of all, if i will be the spokesman i have to know what is going on and i had to be able to look and i dont want to be blindsided. If i am blind sided than i am over. I said of course, go anywhere you want. Anyone would be glad to have you there. What else . He said dont lie. I said come on joe, i dont lie but he said you would be surprised what happens to people. They come down here, get under pressure and they dont lie but they mislead and misleading as bad as a line. So you got to be straight and i said okay, ill be straight. But what else and he said we will never have a press conference unless you have news and i said well, dont reporters like to schmooze around and he said look, you dont understand. Reporters are guys were trying to make a living in the way you make a living is you get a new story with your name on it and he gets on the front page of your paper and you call a News Conference and they reporter thanks this is my story and he comes and you dont have any news what will he do, start asking questions to try to make you Say Something stupid and that is the news. So he had a whole bunch of things like that that i call loftus law. Then i learned a lot about the press from joe. While sometimes people write things you dont like on the whole if you have a constructive attitude and you help them get the facts straight you will be much better off. Then i had a guy named bryce harlow in the white house who was the political counselor and congressional relations guy. He took me under his wing to a certain extent and he had rules and he said never make a promise unless you can deliver on it. If it turns out its really hard to deliver, try all the harder. People only deal with you if they trust you and they trust you if you do what you say you will do. And his word was trust is the claim of the realm. Trust is the coin of the realm. I always try to remember that. But in the Labor Department i had some my first big battle in the congress and i learned something about that so it was a great learning thing. Then i went from there to be director of budget and there you have the whole government in front of you. So, that was great and then i became secretary of the treasury that was a time when we were redid the International Monetary system so i had 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 and i enjoyed the people. Some are still good friends today. But of course when i was secretary of state the tectonic plates of the world changed and when Ronald Reagan and i took office the cold war was as cold as it could get and when we left it was all over so that was a huge thing to be involved in and watch unfold. Mr. Secretary, in your book issues on my mind you got some rules for leadership in a couple of those you have already expounded on, the harlow rule and the joe loftus rule but your first rule is to be a participant. Oh yeah, well, that is what democracy is all about. Early on when i was working in the primaries Ronald Reagan gave me a tie and on the tie it says democracy is not a spectator sport. So be a part of it. Be a part of the politics and will be willing to serve and be a participant. Rule number five. Competence is the name of the game in leadership. It is a great start to be competent. If you are not competent you will get in big trouble. I had a tough experience. I told you when i went to wash and terry as secretary i was innocent and politics and i had a bunch of political appointees slots to fill and i realize that you are trying to work with a diverse constituency so i said i need the best management guy in this industrial, Labor Relations field there is an everyone told me it was a guy named jim hutchins and i talked to him and we got to have a real labor guy, not a lawyer who advises but somebody who negotiates and contracts and stands for election and real union guy. We found a guy named hilton what and he knew his manpower training. We got that. We got to get somebody who worked in the area of how to deal with discrimination in the workplace and so a lawyer who knows the labor market and you get a lot of these people lined up and president elect nixon thought it would show progress in his administration so we thought why dont you bring them to the pure hotel which was no nods and then we can have a meeting and introduce him to the press so we have a meeting and we go down to the press and night introduce jim hudson and they asked him all kinds of questions and it was pretty obvious that jim hudson was a real pro and he knew what he was doing and some guy in the back holds his hand up and says mr. Hutchins are you a democrat or a republican and in my innocence i never even asked and he says im a democrat and so the next week was ernie weber who was dazzling and he just was same guy also his hand up and says im a democrat and it went like that in the last guy was our nominee to be head of the bureau of labor statistics and he was a statistician and arthur burns who is very close to president nixon was something he wanted and i wanted so i thought finally weve got a republican. The sink i asked him the question if he stands there like a cow chewing his good and finally says well, i guess you have to say im an independent but anyway i get back in my hotel room in the phone is ringing off the hook and all durable goods on the Senate Labor Committee are saying dont you know there was an election and i said look, i cleared these names in the white house and with the ranking republican and he was not their favorite republican but anyway i was getting credit because all my guys did terrific and they were competent people and even some of the people who objected called me to say we like your guys. Tim had skin was secretary of the labor and later became our ambassador to japan and ernie became the first [inaudible] at mn ob and so on. If i ruled all these people out because they were registered democrats i would not have had the competence and i am not saying i should have asked the question and done something about it but anyway, if you have competent people around you you will 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 scholz was one of several Hoover Institution authors be interviewed in 2013. Can find them all on website booktv. Org. Up next, another former secretary of state and soon to be director of the Hoover Institution condoleezza rice. In this portion of the program from the Reagan Library 2017 she talks about her book democracy, stories from the long road to freedom. When i think about the democracy it is mysterious thing that people are willing to trust these abstractions constitutions, rule of law and willing to go to the polls and elect people to represent them rather than going into the streets or rather than binding them to clan they trust constitutions and rule of law and that is a very mysterious process and i think as a kid and as a child growing up in birmingham, alabama i was perhaps one who very early on but something more mysterious and i thought that in segregated birmingham alabama you cannot go to Movie Theater or to a restaurant if you were a black person and where you were most certainly a secondclass citizen i saw black citizens still absolutely devoted to the institutions of american democracy and i have one incident in the book that encapsulates it for me and i was six ish years old and my uncle alto had my brothers brother 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 man wallace, George Wallace cant win and i knew in my own six yearold weight that we probably didnt want him to win. So my uncle said oh no, he said we are minorities so he will win and i looked at my uncle and said but then why do they father and my uncle said because they know one day that vote will matter. As i went around the world as secretary of state and saw a long lines of liberians or afghans or iraqis in south africa and latin america and people voting sometimes for the first time ive said one day that vote will matter and we are blessed with this extraordinary gift of democracy and americans in particular were blessed with Founding Fathers who understood and institutional design that would protect our liberties and our right to say what we think to worship as you please and to be free from the secret police at night and to have the dignities that, with having those who will govern you and ask for your consent but if we were blessed with dad and we believe we were endowed by our creator with those rights it cant be true for us and not for them. One of the marvelous legacies of the United States of america and the building in which we sit in the library in which we sit on and the most marvelous legacies of Ronald Reagan was that he never forgot our obligation to speak for the voiceless and he never forgot our allegation to do the right thing in supporting those who just wanted the simple freedoms that we had and he delivered because he believed that the United States of america is an idea and it is an idea that is universal and so that is why i wanted to write this book. [applause] when you are secretary of state you are in a position to rule the worlds opinion of the United States and its actions better than any other american i am sure and i know you are not in office now but you have just over 100 days since we have had the Trump Administration in power and i wonder if you were able to speak to or has there been any change in your mind as to how americans are viewed as we transition from president obama to President Trump . I was in europe not too long after the election and the first thing i said to all my friends was to just settle down. The United States of america is engaging a little bit of a democratic experiment. We have just elected somebody who has never been in governments before and never even sniffed the government before and that president is going to take some time and its a bit of a learning curve but the one thing you can trust is america has institutions that are absolutely firm in absolutely concrete and will hold america in check. If you look at the president s i think he is getting use to the fact that actually it is not as easy as it looks in their and that the american presidency is not just one person but an institution and a constrained institution with the Founding Fathers were very, very terrified of executive power. They were leaving a king and did not want to create a another one. They created a congress to help as a separate and equal branch of government and in fact, it is article one of the constitution as the cars will constantly remind you if you are in the executive branch. And today that congress is made of 545 people and they all think they should be president of the United States. He has courts which he learned will challenge the president and 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 the press as well and Civil Society and americans who are ungovernable. And so, the job of getting to be president is one thing and once you are there it is quite another. The learning curve, i think has been a steep but i think we have seen something that really the world likes and what they see in america. I think the decision to strike the Syrian Air Base after the chemical weapon attack by the a shod regime was an important corrective that we had laid out a red, five years ago and it has been crossed and we have done nothing. That eroded american credibility. In that single strike the administration said, this far and no further. There are just some things that are intolerable. I thought Something Else to in the way this president did that. She remember he said i couldnt sit by and watch babies choking on chemical gas. What he was really saying was as president of the United States i cannot sit by and watch the bees choking on chemical gas and so, i think there is still a lot of water to pass under that bridge and we are still learning in many, many ways what it is like to get up and not just react every time but that some very good things have happened and the one thing i will say is as an american, we have only one president at a time. We have to do everything we can to try to make our president successful and that is where i stand. [applause] a very large of our audience here might think that some in the left and the right that its a waste of our tax dollars is why we would put money into foreign aid when our schools need to be rebuilt and our bridges and all the rest of that so coming from a former secretary of state do think theres a foreign aid argument that is, you know, that is really important for the American People to grasp . For me it is a little bit of the same argument i would make for democracy and promoting democracy. You can say lets just Pay Attention to our own affairs. Weve got to build our bridges and rebuild our bridges in pennsylvania so why are we building bridges in afghanistan and you can say our schools are not in great shape so why are we trying to send girls to school in nigeria. You can say all those things. But i think there are two very 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. If life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are univ