Peoples Services Less well attended. In the book, as well summarized gen. Powell it was very important that that rule be the first of the 13 rules. I start that description by saying its not necessarily the case, but its the attitude you should have. Things will get better. You are going to make them better. It is within your license to make things better. As you go through the rules, perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. Multiplier is a military term, ways to enhance the power of our force. Were looking for things that make the force more effective. So, i have found in working with , and this book is about working with human beings, i find if you convey an attitude of perpetual optimism, we can do it, we can do it, it becomes a force multiplier. To roberts real question, when i go across the country, i see all of the problems discussed here in the problem with overseas adventures and other crises around the world but i have also seen around the , people who are , financial leaders, i still find people are optimistic. Reaganlikest confidence among the people. If theres anything really bugging them, it is that they sensed their leaders in washington do not understand how much confidence and optimism is still out there and theyre waiting for their leaders in washington to cut through the gordian knots and get this country moving. Thisoptimistic about country. These are not the worst of times. People forget in my lifetime, 1968 andas like in 1964. 68 when Martin Luther king was assassinated and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. And then bobby, martin, the vietnam war, race riots, racial problems, the Vice President resigned in disgrace, we had not come out of the it not win that war. The president resigned in disgrace. There was still a constellation aligned against us. And yet, through all of that, we lost hope. Jerry ford came through with simple midwestern values. President carter and had difficulties with the economy and then Ronald Reagan shows up and he says it is morning in america. Here we are. And a few years later, the soviet union is gone. Its china trying to become a by invading,not but by selling to us. They got pretty good. Imagine where we are now. Is selling a stuff. And the money we are paying buy, they then loan us to more stuff. This is our economic problem, ladies and gentlemen. Weve got to figure this out. Optimistic. Ve to be what fuels this is what makes us americans. Robert i did not know until reading the book that an important subject is the hustler. Gen. Powell the hustler, for those of you not old enough to member the movie, its a movie about a pool hall. Paul newman is determined to be the champion. He thinks hes the best in the world. He goes into this pool hall in new york. In the game starts and fast eddie is good. Hes very, very good, but minnesota fats has a manager or financer sitting in the chair, watching all of this. As the evening goes on, they are. Rinking and shooting cool minnesota fats is becoming desperate and looking to jersy squat. He says, stick with this kid. Hes a loser. Minnesota fats keeps losing. And he says, i got him, i got him. He excuses himself. Goes to the bathroom. He comes out a few minutes later and he is reaching for his coat. They think. And as the attendant is about to bring his coat out to him instead of taking his coat, minnesota fats smiles, puts his hands up, has talcum powder put on his hands. He looks at fast eddie and says, lets play some pool. He beats the devil out of them. Minnesota fats never gave up. He thought he could win. He did win. Against eddies weakness. As i say in the book, i love t scene and many today many a day when i was in trouble, which was a frequent occasion, where i had to testify before congress or face a hostile press [laughter] gen. Powell so help me, i would put my uniform on or my suit and i would go to the restroom and i would wash my hands and i would look in the american i would myself softly, fast eddie, lets play some pool. Robert but gen. Powell i never watch the last scene. The staraul newman is of the movie. He has to beat minnesota fats at the end. I never watch it. I dont want to see that. Robert you turn it off early. You visited a Japanese School. A school full of kids driven to exceed. To succeed. Gen. Powell a private Japanese School in tokyo. Very intelligent, smart kids from welltodo families. I give my speech to the students. I love talking to students. I talked to them wherever i go. Whenever i was through questions , i noticed kids were lining up with her little cards with their questions. I dont like that because these are questions the teachers have looked at and improved. These are the honor roll kids. I took a couple of them and then i started looking into the audience, does anyone else have a question . At the back ofy the auditorium where i used to hang out when i was her age, she raises her hand and she gets up and says, general, are you ever afraid . Im always afraid. Im afraid every day. Why are you never afraid . I said, im afraid of something almost every day and i fail at something almost every day if not every day, and what you have to learn to do, my dear is fear and failure are a normal part of human existence and you have to learn how to control it. You will never defeat it, but you can manage it. Have confidence in yourself. Ofoptimistic you can get out the problem youre having. If its a failure, figure out the problem youre having. Move on. See what is ahead. He room was deadly still i think everybody had that thought in their minds. Kids are afraid and may have to be taught to manage and overcome fear. It was emotionally moving moment for me. If i can digress for a moment, robert, most of the book is like this. We will get to the top, hard chapters about my time as secretary of state, but this is a book of parables, stories, reflections and memories. There were 44 short chapters. Heavy lifting. It will take three hours. Some of the chapters are a page in a order long. I think the longest one is eight or nine pages. And you can dive in anywhere. Theres no sequence. No coherence. So they wont read the last chapter or so have you i gather when you were hanging around at the back of the classroom, you were not the obvious qualifier, most likely to succeed . Gen. Powell absolutely right. I come from an immigrant family. My parents came here in the 1920s with a lot of my other relatives. They settled in new york, finally after bouncing around a little bit. They all had children. There are a lot of cousins in the family. We were all simply taught. We have expectations for you. We did not come to this country to have children who will stick something up their nose or not get an education. We have expectations. And do not do anything that shames the family, do you understand . In trouble, wet begged to be beaten rather than the familyt shamed bit. It was devastating. The third thing we were taught was a word that you do not hear much anymore. Mine germanic is, mind your teachers, mind your adults. Family expected us to go somewhere. My cousins became lawyers and doctors and judges. I just sort of hung around clling up with a straight average through high school and city college in new york. I am not sure how i got in, but i got in and graduated with a low average years later. The only way i got out of city college was because i was great in rotc. I found my calling. I wanted to be a soldier. I got straight as in rotc. They rolled back into the overall grade point average. That brought me up to 2. 0. They said, good enough for government work, and i am out of here. I am nowrt considered one of the greatest successes the city college has ever had. They named a center after me. He Colin Powell Center my professors are rolling over in their graves. It isll kids, this not where you start in life. It is what you do along the way. Your past is not your present and its not your future. Your past is your past. Grow. Ive always been growing. Never think you cant make it. While the problems with our country right now, our Graduation Rates are not where they should the. , if i had everd gone home and told those two immigrant people, my parents they were short people, about 53 and 55, if i had ever said, yeah, i think i will drop out, the answer would have been, we will drop you out and go get another kid. It aint going to happen. Theres a chapter in the book called we are mammals. Essentially i love not only the love animal clinic, national geographic, while kingdom. I love watching lions and tigers raise their cubs, their kids. What i get from it, the cubs finally opens its eyes and dont and is allowed to move so far from the mom in the den. But only so far. If he steps outside the box at the long age or is not ready for it, bam, she hits him upside the head with her paw and back in. Grows, gets little further. Your daddy is out there somewhere. Other than that, he doesnt do much. Hes just around. [laughter] is, iowell but the point watch this and its years old they are sent out on their own, but what has happened in that two years, they have learned the importance of their siblings, their cousins, the females in the pride, and the role of the male and the pride. They have passed on to them a thousand generations of what it is to be a lion and how do we that, how can we imagine we dont have that same mammalian requirement to pass on all the experiences we have as human beings to our children . That there are too many children in america who are not having that experience. And if you do not have a good arians past debt good experience, but guess what . See the bad things in life. Robert when we spoke last week at npr, i told you that ive been to make up to jamaica for the first time. When i recorded two jamaicans talking to each other i could not understand where they were saying. And you grew up bilingual. Gen. Powell all my relatives spoke with a heavy jamaican accent. My mother and father were not too bad, but i had a couple aunts i could not hardly understand it all. They never lost it. I could speak with them and i could also slip into a jamaican patois if i had to. No problem. Mon, i was telling robert, there are certain things in the language you have to understand. If you say in jamaican, how you doin . And he says, not bad, not bad, that means hes doing good. If you say, how you doin . Goodhey say, not good, not. That means bad. You have to understand that reversal in the lexicon. There was the special feeling for the place that we came from or they came from. It was very tightknit. Theres a story i didnt tell it in the book, but elsewhere, in my neighborhood in the south bronx, it was all timid tenements him of course and i had aunts living in every building. When i welcome from school about four blocks, they were all hanging out the window, leaning on the windowsill. They never left. They didnt cook to rid they didnt go to the bathroom. They were always there, watching. And if any one of the cousins did anything wrong, got caught misbehaving, it was instant retaliation for her you talk about the speed of the internet, nothing compares to the speed of the south bronx section of new york city. We were there greatest treasure. Our children are our greatest treasures today. They would not let us fail. We have too many children in america today, particularly in our inner cities and rural areas, indian reservations, which are not being raised to not fail. A poor family,om went to private schools, he of histhe valedictorian class. The firstrst person in his family to have such an honor. I said, how did it happen . You said i never, ever had the opportunity to fail. Me. Would not let anytime something went wrong, were there. I was never allowed to fail. Robert one chapter of the book is called tell me what you know. And you write about a book you developed for your intelligence staff. One, tell me what you know. Tell me what you dont know. Tell me what you think. And always distinguish which from which your this brings us to iraq. I guess my big question is an huge capital letters, how . But specifically, someone only identify with caution in the use of military force, never going to light, weighing our obligations very carefully,eing very much the realist tell me about the decision that was made to go to war in iraq and your presentation to the human u. N. Past year ofin the president bushs administration, george w. Bush, iraq was not an issue. Remember, we had planes flying over the northern portion of shooting, iraqis were and for the most part they were contained. The sanctions regime was starting to break down. We were watching carefully to see whether we can allow the iraqions to break down and is free to do whatever it wants to, make weapons of mass destruction again. Remember, they had them in the first gulf war. They use them against their own people. They fired them against the iranians. It was not a figment of our imagination. We thought they had them. Aey also were playing with Nuclear Program that was not that far along and we had a pretty good idea they were playing with biological weapons as well, which are much more difficult to use, but nevertheless are deadly. Faced with thes challenge of ringing the country together and fighting this conflict we are now in, brought to us in afghanistan via al qaeda. That. They do not stay under control, but then the president s attentions turned to iraq. Be a nexis between the weapons of mass destruction that iraq has or could develop and terrorism. So the president started to ask his military authorities to give tendency,for such a which they do. Theugust of 2002, i send president is receiving a lot of military information but we have not put it in a political context. And we wentas there into his private study. , if we, mr. President have to use military force to take out this regime, we become the government of this country. National law. There are 25 Million People standing there. You are in charge. If you break it, you own it was the expression i used. And we talked about it for a while, what that meant, what the implications could be. Said, watching we do . I said, we should avoid the war. Lets go to the u. N. Are the the they offended party. Lets see if we can get a resolution and see if saddam was to play by the rules and give us all of the information we know he has. The president agreed. In september of 2002 we went before the u. N. And made the case for the u. N. To get engaged and get the inspectors back and pass necessary resolutions. I work on the resolution and the draft and we got a resolution in early november putting saddam on notice and demanding that he return all of the information. He flunked that test. I made it clear to the president that if he passed the test, we stuck with Saddam Hussein in power. I also made it clear that if it was necessary to use military force, i would be fully supportive. Late january, none of us were satisfied with what the u. N. Had been able to uncover. By the middle of january, the president decided force was necessary. By the end of january i was with him and he said, we need to present our case to the United Nations and i would like you to do it. And do it next week. So, i had four days. When i saw the case, it was not while we needed. It did not connect up with the intelligence. It did not cross reference things. We said, how did it get like this . We provided all of the information to the nsc. They took it from there. The president had already announced i would be there. I was not worried because there was a National Intelligence estimate asked for by the congress that had gone before the previous fall and congress had overwhelmingly residence t resolutions saying to the president , try to solve this diplomatically. If you cant, we will support you going to war. It was not a close vote. I knew i could pull it off. There was four days and four thets with my staff, with record of intelligence and the intelligence communities who came together. And iled it all together tossed a lot of it aside because there were not a lot of sources and things that were in the presentation i was not sure were well sourced. ,o i went up to new york brought the charts and slides and had a presentation that had been vetted by the cia. Every word was attested to. There was intelligence the president had. My colleagues had been using it. Thats what i presented, and i thought it went rather well. The British Foreign ministers joined me in agreeing and others were not in agreement, but thats where we were. Within a few weeks, we nobodyred, hate, hey, found anything. We cant find anything. Some of the sourcing we have acted on,of, congress the president acted on, we all , i was taken aback when sourcest there were 4 only to discover it was a Single Source and we had never met them. The germans had him we were getting information from the germans and we had never talk to this guy. Case for the presence of weapons of mass destruction fell apart. We still felt he had capability and that free of sanctions he would develop them. We knew that there is everything imaginable that could be bad. But the thing that we presented that said they were there turned out not to be the case. Now, a lot of people agreed with the case and bought into it. Six months later, the cia said we still support the judgments. E made last year so, the problem i have had for the last nine years is notwithstanding all that, my presentation is seen as the defining one, the most prominent one, and became the symbol of the intelligence package we put together and i have been answering questions about it. All it can say is so don was gone and i am glad we do not have to worry about weapons of mass destruction being present or not presence. Completely is not out of the transition, but we have given them an opportunity for a better life for their people. I will always regret my presentation was wrong. I get offended when people say you knew better. You knew this was a lie. No, we accepted considered judgment and local judgment of all 16 intelligence agencies, im still seen as the symbol of it all and that is something i have to work with, but i discussed this in the book. I will never get rid of that. It will be in my obituary, so i have to keep moving forward. Else involvedone in this you apologized, actually but unlike anyone else involved in this, you apologized, actually i said ill no, regretted it. I did not apologize. If he remained in power, he would be in compliance. In reality, he did not have any weapons of mass destruction. Yes. Powell he chose not to take the get out of jail card. We gave him that opportunity. But he didnt want us to know he didnt have them, he did not want his own people to know he did not have them. He really thought we would not attack. Somebody would stop us the french, the germans, the russians. Somebody would keep it from happening and president bush was himrmined we had to remove on this threat and provide a better life for the ir