Rose Jake Sullivan, next. And by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose Jake Sullivan is here. He serves as deputy chief of staff to secretary of state Hillary Clinton and as National Security advisor to Vice President joe biden. He was also a senior policy advisor on clintons 2016 president ial campaign. He has been one of her closest aides for over a decade. Many believe he would have been National Security advisor had clinton won the 2016 president ial election. He is now a visiting professor at Yale Law School and Senior Advisor to the u. S. Government on the iran nuclear negotiations. I am pleased to have him at this table for the first time welcome. Thanks for having pe. Rose to know a little i think the single biggests . Thing is saying yes to opportunities when they come along. I always thought that i would head back home to minnesota and build a life and career there. Rose in the law and politics. And when i finished with Justice Breyer in 2005, i moved home thinking thats where i was going to be. Joined a law firm, got engaged in the community and Amy Klobuchar asked me if i would help her get up and running in d. C. In her first year as a senator, then the next opportunity came along to work for her and prepare her for the debates in the 2008 president ial primary. The next opportunity came on. Each time i said im going back home to minnesota, and each time i found a chance to serve, and the result has been an extraordinary opportunity for me to learn and try to do a few good things along the way. Rose wooed mod city, tell me what you think it is you brought to the table. Its what ive learned at no matter what your argument is, its going to have weaknesses and blind spots. No matter how wrong you think the other good guy is, they will have good points to make and you need to acknowledge both those things. I learned that earlier on. I tried to find the weaknesses and blind spots on our side and what the good arguments were on the other side. The nucle a few points theyre not long and we have to find a way to stop this hole or the iranians. So in addition to working hard and studying the issues, i think thats a skill set thats important in washington and getting to be in short supply. Rose meaning making sure that you hear the other side. You hear the other side, but even more than hearing the other side, that you study your own position more than i think most people do and youre willing to change your mind, youre willing to say, you know, i thought that was the right way to go about it. Turns actually we ought to do it differently. Rose i dont know if this is relevant but there is an interesting glimpse in the book shattered in the campaign about which secretary clinton was being bombarded by you and others about questions she faced and she said, you try this, you will see how easy this is, wont you . Yeah, so we were doing debate prep. Actually, it was the day after bernie had won the michigan primaries, it was a hard day. We were down in miami in advance of another primary debate before a set of really important primaries, and i was chiding secretary clinton for her answers to questions, and she said, all right, lets do it this way why dont you be me, then ill be bernie, and well see how you do . She said the book makes it sound like it was incredibly rankerrous. It wasnt, she was trying to help me see what it was to be in that position. Rose was it informative . It was. I wish i had done it in 2008. I had gone through debate prep for her in 2008 with president obama. It was late in the game i understood from the perspective of the person youre preparing what its like to go through that. So thats exactly the kind of thing folks in my field should do more of. Rose did i mistake in 2008 you worked for her than him . I worked for her in the primary and in the general election i prepared him for the debates against john mccain. Rose well hear when she writes her book about what happened. You were there, you saw what was going on. What happened . Well, theres a reason she wrote a book on this because it takes an entire book, i think, to fully explain it. The complexity and interconnectedness of a whole bunch of different strands all coming together on one day in november to produce a defeat. I think if it had been almost any other day she probably would have won the election. Rose why do you believe that . In part because of what happened in the closing days of the campaign. Jim comey came out october 28 den ten days before the election. Rose and you guys had momentum at that time. Exactly. Then came out again two days before the election with the letter saying im now once again exonerating secretary clinton and hoo ma abedin. So this was an election with ebbs and flows that happened rapidly and repeatedly and if you look at a chart of the gap between trump and clinton, it would get wider and narrower week by week, month by month and it was only at very certain points for a few days at a time trump closed the gap and got even with her. But if it was a week later or earlier, the odds she won would not have been small. So this goes to how contingent this would be. Rose it also says something about the momentum of campaigns. People say if Hubert Humphrey would have had two more weeks he would have won the election as well. And he might have or not, i cant say with any degree of certitude. I divide the challenges we faced in the campaign into three categories. The first is the exoj now variables, the fact of the f. B. I. Investigation along with comeys late intervention and the fact of a sophisticated, systematic kremlin directed warfare direction by the russians, both had an impact on this. Rose and you believe at the hand of president putin. Its not that i believe it was at the hand of president putin. Our Intelligence Community concluded this was directed from president putin at the highest levels of the kremlin that he had an interest in interfering in american democracy, seeing President Trump win and Hillary Clinton lose. Rose he didnt like Hillary Clinton or wanted donald trump . He wanted to disrupt american democracy. Rose because he felt we tried to disrupt his campaign. Partly tit for tat. Rose and the ukraine as well. Partly tit for tat. It was pay back for what he felt was American Intervention in russia and ukraine, both of which i think were dead wrong, but partly also because hes trying to drive an authoritarian model and discredit democracy. Hes trying to do it in europe and the United States. He wants to be able to turn to his people and say keep me in power because the alternative are these broken down systems with all this chaos whether its germany or france or the United States. So sowing chaos in democracies is part of putins Number One Mission of maintaining power for himself in russia. Thats part of it. In addition, he had personal beef with Hillary Clinton going back years. Part of that was about gender and part of it was about the fact she took tough substances against putins behavior in Eastern Europe and against his own people. And i think he genuinely thought it was a birthday president for him that he had a candidate like donald trump who not only adopted kremlin positions only almost every issue but the language and the logic of the kremlin, saying we cant say anything about whats happening in russia because we have killers, too. Thats exactly the kind of thing putin would say is that said that in an interview. Right. Rose do you also believe president obama could have made a difference had he been stronger in his own declarations about russian hacking . I think that president obama was in an impossible position on this issue. Here he was the commanderinchief trying to defend american democracy but the standard bearer in the Democratic Party in the middle of an election with a democrat against a republican and he wanted badly to avoid appearance he was putting on the scale in this election and thats to his credit. I understand how he decided not to. Rose do you think secretary clinton understands . I think she does. And this is something well reflect on in her book. Rose sounds like you read her book. I talked to her about it, ive seen drafts and i cant say ive seen some product start to finish. Ill pick it up off the shelves like i would encourage everyone else to. But i think putting that aside, the fact that he chose not to do so for understandable reasons, had he decided to both publicly and privately make a much bigger deal out of this, i think it may have had a more deterrent impact on putin, but these are issues you can only look at in hindsight. Rose youve said youve agonized and lost sleep, this defeat, you said you now know the hue multiof defeat. This the first time you have been defeated in your life in a sense of wanting something badly and not getting it . I suppose you could say its the first time on any scale that matters. I mean, ive done everything from lose Cross Country races to do battling on tests to, you know, in the past not getting exactly the job i wanted at different points. Thats happened in my life. But this is the first time where something was riding on it beyond just kind of what i wanted rose and i assume you could say what i thought was in the best interest of the country and i thought we could make a difference and notwithstanding what i fliewbs i miffed among the people trying to shape the world. Right, and among the merger of my desire to win because i have a competitive streak and wanted the opportunity to serve again and the the fact of us having Hillary Clinton as president and not donald trump would have made a profound difference of the future of the country and the world. This was on a scale i unlike would have experienced before. This is to draw from but this is not just about myself. This is also how to think about the future of the United States, both our policy and our politics, and our sense of how we relate to one another and i think this core question of who are we as a country is one that is very much up in the air. Rose did you say the things that the campaign and her believed in but somehow they werent heard . Somehow because to have the way president ial campaigns work and somehow because of the way people perceive the person speaking it didnt get through . So after the campaign, i had a meeting with one of the british politicians who was leading the remain campaign for brexit and they lost. So here i was working on the campaign, losing to trump, and this is a guy who lost to brexit. He said to me, you know, in both cases the common denominator was we were trying to provide answers and what people really wanted was anger, a sense you got it, that the system was broken. They didnt want dry policy. Rose thats not a proposition. Not necessarily. Rose im not a politician, but dont you have to say to people you want to support you, you know, i hear you and i feel your pain . You do, but the question is how do you balance the diagnosis part of your message and the prescription part of your message . And both bernie and trump were very heavy on the diagnosis and thats really what people wanted. Hillary clinton by constitution, by who she is deep down fundamentally is much more of a prescription person than a diagnosis person. Shes going to want to look at you and say i can help solve your problem through the following four steps. Rose where would you put her husband . I would say he has more of the diagnosis bit in him going back to his days as a politician pressing the flesh in arkansas, back in the 70s, and the i feel your pain piece of bill clinton is something thats famous about his personality. So if you look at what hillary was arguing for in this race, the types of policies that she was pressing, and you look at now what the Democratic Party has embraced as their message going forward, theyre very similar. In fact hillary was on the leading edge of many issues that are now coming to the fore. For example, she talked a lot about growing monopoly power of corporations which is becoming a progressive watch word. She talked about rose which is one of the key stones of Bernie Sanders campaign. Is this but one of the things hillary did that bernie didnt talk that much about is this issue of antitrust and competition and market concentration. Bernie talked about the banks and breaking up the banks. Rose and wall street. He talked about singlepayer health care, but the idea the corporate sector in the United States is getting consolidated and concentrated across the board and, as a result, people are extracting monopoly rents, this was an argument that has had a long history in the Democratic Party going back to the populist days that hillary was putting forth that is at the center of what democrats are arguing. That is one of many examples where i think she was on the right track, but our capacity as a campaign to connect that to the lived experience of people across the country was not rose how much of that is a question of the candidate and how much of it is a question of the campaign . You know, its really hard to say when youre the campaign and not the candidate. I have a tendency to try to take responsibility under my and our shoulders. Hillary was out there busting her tail every day doing everything she could. So i would like to believe there was more we could have done to set her up for success. Rose how have you handled defeat yourself . How do you deal with something that is so monumental that would have shaped at least if she had won probably the next eight years of your life . I think number one you have to look at what the real ramifications of this are. The effect on me and my life day to day compared to the effect on the lives of immigrant families or people on the verge of losing health care rose its relative. Or 11 Million People in seoul who are scared when they go to sleep at night, its hard for me to ask that question. All i can do is think, now that this has happened, what can i learn looking backwards, but more importantly in the landscape we face today domestically and internationally, what can i help to be constructive, and in doing that, to recognize whatever you think of donald trump, 62 million americans voted for this guy. Those people, they had an argument to make about how government wasnt looking out for them, and we owe them answers as well and im looking to try to find what some of those answers are. Rose you said and i tend to agree, the biggest challenge see on the campaign, of course, as a policy guy is the difficulty of pushing through the cable and social Media Chatter to try to engage with the American People in a serious conversation about real issues that impact their lives and the future of this country. I think candidates and their staff are equally responsible for that because thos those of n the media, especially at this table, wanted nothing more as you know in the campaign i engaged her in an hour conversation and would have done more right. Rose and people because of the risk of campaigns dont want to do that that much. I would say that if Hillary Clinton had been given an opportunity on a nightly basis, donald trump gets one hour, she gets, every night, and they make policy presentations and thats how the campaign was run, she would have taken that in a heart beat. Rose policy presentations, i think engaged conversation. Fair enough. A ruthless, brutal interview on name your subject. What are you going to do about American Military engagement rose one night trump, one night hillary. Right. Hillary would have welcomed that. All three of the debates which were largely substantive dud cover the issues and all three of which she came through with flying colors. So i dont think its a fair of all the criticisms to make against hillarys campaign, the idea she wasnt prepared and the campaign wasnt prepared to go with the issues i dont think was right. I mean, the thing that she has rose you will grant me that how many onehour conversations did she do during the conversations . I could add the number of interviews she set aside thinking they were going to be on policy subjects and the first 30 minutes of them were on emails. Right down to rose but you would not expect somebody not to engage that question, would you not . I think there becomes a real issue of balance here, and a good example of that is the National Security forum that took place on the deck of the intrepid here in new york where matt lauer had 30 minutes with Hillary Clinton and 30 minutes with donald trump on the big National Security issues of the day countering i. S. I. S. , north korea, russia, et cetera and spent the bulk of the time on emails, you have to ask whether or not rose there was balance. Hillary would constantly walk into interviews with the hope it will get around to her policy positions. Indeed, i would argue that one of the things that makes it hard s what we call acandidate is she responsibility gene. She feels responsible not just for giving the best answer on the campaign trail but an answer she believes she could deliver governing, making for longer position papers, doesnt make for good sound bytes or a simple message, but it would have made for a heck of a good agenda for working families in the u. S. Rose whats going to happen to the Democratic Party . I think the Democratic Party is going to be okay. There is clearly a strong, internal debate going on now