Democracy and Freedom: A Conversation with Condoleezza Rice

ladies and gentlemen please welcome the 43rd President of the United States George w thank you thank you all very much tonight's going to be awesome we've got two fantastic women that are going to educate us on a subject that is vital to the interests of our country which is democracy someone under challenge here at home people are disillusioned are getting disillusioned with the system and needed abroad for the sake of peace before and I introduced a condi and Dana I do want to thank Northern Trust who has sponsored this event I want to thank the supporters of the bush Center members of the engage community and Bush Cheney alumni Loren I had a chance to say hello to some of the folks that had worked with us in Washington and it's a joy to see them that's a joy not to be in Washington as well the bush center is Abele run by Ken Hirsch and we want to thank you for your leadership Ken and his wife Julie is with him and the executive directors Holly kuzmich and we thank you as well Holly today before o board members pan pets Li and Karen Protheroe are with us as well thank you all for being here the we have a program here called pink ribbon red ribbon it began because when we came back from Washington we discovered that women who have the HIV virus on the continent of Africa are likely to get cervical cancer and the leading cause of death for women on the conative Africa is cervical cancer so think about living in a African village and women are dying from AIDS in the US and others March in with one of the most compassionate health care programs ever and women live and then they die from a disease that's eminently curable and so we had a board meeting today Conte's the chair of it ambassador deborah birx here who works in the State Department runs the PEPFAR program which is the AIDS initiative and is doing a hell of a job as well as charity Wallace our board member so we thank you all for being here by the way for those of you who support our program here's what's happened three hundred seventy thousand women have been screened the first step of dealing with cervical cancer is to convince women to be screened that's a lot and we can do a lot more and we'll 119 thousand girls have been vaccinated against HPV which of course is the best way to deal with the issue so we're making progress I'm proud of what what we've done here at the Institute and you just need to know we're still focused on it as America retreats the bush center charges and so one of the things I've benefited from in my life is being surrounded by strong women the first woman strong woman I was surrounded by I had no choice mother the second strong woman I was surrounded with by surrounded by I had a choice Laura we have some often asked as a leader what do you what do you like what this is how do you make decisions on who to surround yourself with and the answer is surround yourself with people to know what you don't know and listen to them I benefited a lot as president by having strong women tell me what I didn't know I wisely listened two of them are here I'm a former press spokesman now Haute and by the way that's a tough damn job trying to interpret in English what I have spoken and that was Dana's job she is a host of the daily briefing which comes on at 1 o'clock central I said to Dana I never watch it and Laura says because you're always taking a nap at that time she's also on the five and evidently that comes on at five and she's really good at what she does and she'll be interviewing the author of democracy stories from the long road to freedom condi is also a remarkable woman our friendship is forged in fire I seen her under enormous stress maintain her composure and her and her capacity to think through issues and think through problems when the great moments of the presidency came when she and yo-yo ma performed a concert at Constitution Hall she is remarkable a great friend please welcome Dana and Condoleezza Rice well it's wonderful to be here in this room in some ways when I come here even though I grew up in Wyoming and Colorado I come to Texas and I feel like I came home so and certainly at the bush center I feel that way so all of you here hello and all of you in the open flow room thanks for being here and I will come see you in a moment but first we have Condoleezza Rice who is really an inspiration I think to all of us and I had someone today on social media after I interviewed her on my show say Condoleezza Rice is a national treasure before I jump into questions I do want to give you one anecdote recently I was asked to do an interview with a reporter that used to cover the Bush administration and she was writing about a book about women in Washington and how women could have the opportunity to move up in management or leadership in government faster than they could in corporate America and I said well that's actually an interesting topic I'd be happy to talk to you so her first question to me was how hard was it to work in the bush White House since it was such an old boys network and I got my press secretary hat on and was kind of mad because I said let me just give you an example of my day if I had a question and I needed to answer on foreign policy I would call Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on homeland security I'd call Fran Townsend if I needed some gun legislative affairs it was candy Wolf's counsel's office I'd call Harriet Miers finally somebody from education has secretary Spelling's I could go on because there were so many women that were in the senior leadership and President Bush doesn't get enough credit for that so if we could give him a round of applause all right so I told the secretary Rice's gonna ask her a question that I think is a good conversation starter and I've used this at some dinner parties recently and I think for her it's actually a really good one which is what is your first news memory and did it influence your educational or career decisions well thank you very much in first of all it's really great to be here at the bush center and president mrs. Bush thank you for everything that you've done and continue to do and Dana thank you and now since we known each other for so long you're gonna have to call me condi it's hard for me to do it but I'll try so my first memories my first memory was really of the race to put a man in space and we would watch on television and one thing that was happening then that if we have kind of atomized news now but everybody watched either the huntley-brinkley report which is what my parents and I watched or Walter Cronkite a few people watched Howard K Smith and so we saw the same race to get into space and all the little kids would go out in the backyard and and pretend to be astronauts and some portal it had to be the ground controller passed a home that was never me by the way but in any case that was really my first memory but the first memory of news that really had an effect was Cuban Missile Crisis I was a little girl seven years old Birmingham Alabama and I remember that it seemed my father and mother this was something they couldn't protect me from I kind of knew that and it was Birmingham and so they would have the news stories on at night with big red arrows coming from Cuba to Birmingham which is was supposed to be the distance that the missiles could go but of course it really wasn't but Birmingham wanted to be relevant so that's what they did and we had I just remember thinking that that was very scary and I maybe maybe somewhere deep inside it sparked my interest in things international I actually became principally expert on nuclear weapons and military affairs and so that's really my first real news memory and being in front of the television for the entire period of the Cuban Missile Crisis every night waiting to see what the president was going to do and years later when you're working on Cuba policy did you remember that I did and in fact something that I said really kind of followed me I was speaking to a group of Cuban Americans and I said something that I really believed I said Fidel Castro put missiles Soviet missiles on Cuban territory to give the Soviet Union the ability to reach the United States and he should pay for it until he dies and I absolutely believe that and Cuba was never gonna be a friend of the United States under Fidel Castro and it's not gonna be a friend of the United States under Raul Castro as well I actually didn't intend to ask about Cuba but I think I will because there's others the moves that President Obama made and then President Trump has sought to sort of pull back some of those do you think that's the right policy well I was never one who believed we were forever going to have an embargo but I think that in the Bush administration we had a better a better approach which was to challenge the Cuban regime to make progress on the release of prisoners to make progress on letting people have access to technology and to the outside world and then saying step by step we will improve us-cuban relations because nobody wants permanent enemies I think to simply open up to Cuba let too much pressure off the regime and now we have this bizarre situation in which secretary Tillison has had to tell Americans not to travel to Cuba because there's some mysterious virus or illness that is that is going around so I think you're almost always better to challenge a regime like that to do something differently and to make it a quid pro quo for recognition because people underestimate the power of recognition from the United States of America when the United States of America says we recognize your government we recognize your people it makes a difference and so that's not something that should ever be sold sold short so your book is on democracy it is filled with anecdotes in particular and for those of in the audience that might not be familiar you've said that you grew up in Birmingham Alabama and then of course there was a civil rights movement and then you ultimately you went to Denver my hometown if tell us a little bit about your childhood in that decision by your parents to leave you've also written a book about your parents yes well we I was born in Birmingham Alabama I was born in 1954 I'm 62 don't start counting as a young girl a young child you were vaguely aware that it was second-class citizenship for black people this was the height of Jim Crow couldn't go to a restaurant couldn't go to a movie theater didn't have a white classmate until we moved to Denver but I grew up in this lovely little cocoon really a little middle class neighborhood I think everybody on my block was a schoolteacher okay and it was all about faith and church that was the principal activity and then education and family and so it was protective of its children and it was almost as if they said Bull Connor the police commissioner is not going to have our kids and so we were taught that we could do anything we wanted to do even if we couldn't have a hamburger at Woolworth's lunch counter we were taught that there are no victims because the minute you consider yourself a victim you have given control of your life to somebody else and we were told and we were told you're gonna have to be twice as good now this wasn't said as a matter of debate this was said as a matter of fact and so I went around with my friends trying to be twice as good I now tell my students if you work hard enough to think you're twice as good you're gonna be very confident and I think that's what my parents were saying but in reference to Birmingham and the book I also think that that was the setting in which I learned the true meaning of democracy and democratic transitions so I relate in the book being with my uncle Alto my my mother's brother he picked me up from school and it was election day in Alabama and George Wallace was on the ballot now I knew in my own little you know six-year-old way that this man George Wallace wasn't good for black people so we passed a long long line of black people voting and I said to my uncle I said so if all those people vote this man Wallace can't win and my uncle said oh no he said we're a minority he said and so Wallace is gonna win and I said to my uncle so why do they bother and my uncle said because they know that one day that vote will matter now as I looked around the world and I saw Iraqis standing in line to vote or Afghans even though there were terrorist threats against them or Liberians there's South Africans people voting really meaningfully for the first time they know that one day that vote will matter not immediately but one day that vote will matter and it's such an empowering moment for people and so I think I always care at that moment in my head as I watched people struggling to be free around the world.you right that the civil rights movement was really the Great Awakening yes are we still waking up we're still waking up the the civil rights movement I think was the second democratic transition so if you read the tremendous words of the Declaration of Independence and and of the Constitution about equality obviously America was born with a birth defect which was slavery and it took us a hundred years more than a hundred years and then take took another hundred years to begin to give rights to the descendants of slaves but the remarkable thing is that these descendants of slaves trusted the American Constitution enough that they honestly believed they were going to learn they were going to earn their rights through the very Constitution that it once counted them as three-fifths of a man in the first first compromise so the n-double-a-cp would actually sit and Thurgood Marshall and others they had something called a Margo report and every Friday morning they would choose cases to take to various courts around the country to try to challenge on constitutional grounds various aspects of discrimination they'd win some they'd lose some but think about that to channel that through institutions we tend to think of the civil rights movement it has as having been all about the marches in Birmingham yes about the bus boycott in Selma yes but it was also this really unbelievable unfathomable trust in American institutions that somehow they were gonna live up to their obligations and to what they said they were now today we're still fighting a lot of these struggles because it isn't easy to overcome that kind of prejudice but when I look at America today I think how far we've come I also relate in the book that when President Bush swore me in as Secretary of State I took picture of that yeah I took an oath to the Constitution that had counted my ancestors as three-fifths of man and I took it in front of a portrait of Ben Franklin I kept thinking I wonder what old Ben would think this and the swearing in was by a Jewish woman justice named Ruth Bader Ginsburg and who was with you there so there that's my aunt G and my aunt Mattie who's now deceased in my uncle they must have been these were my my mother's brothers and sisters unfortunately my parents were by this time deceased but I kind of felt them their presence there the entire time but but that's the kind of progress that we've made and we have to remember that democracies are imperfect at their birth because they're usually a compromise of interest to get to some stable place and then you just have to keep working at it day after day after day and so the reason that America is such a beacon for the world is not because it's perfect it's because it's imperfect and keeps working at its imperfections and I think when you look around the world a story like this is empowering for people because they realize even if it took us a long time we're getting there as we look around the world do you think democracy is in retreat well this is an academic debate these days some of my colleagues at Stanford democracy is not on the march like we had hoped it would be we had us we had several events the collapse of the Soviet Union and the birth of democracies across Eastern Europe we had the Arab Spring and the hope that the Middle East was really now breaking out but if you look at where we were say 35 or 40 years ago democracy has made tremendous progress it made it's not going to be a straight line and there have been some setbacks in places like Turkey there have been setbacks but democracies are still being born people are still fighting for their rights Dana when I taught I taught a course called the role of the military in politics as a young faculty member at Stanford I could always talk about at least two or three Latin American hunters in places like Brazil or Chile or Argentina and today these are all functioning democracies and so we have to keep the big picture in mind and realize that even if democracy has stalled in some places it's it's still there it's still making progress and people are still determined to be free you are an expert in Russia and we were expert in the Soviet Union and you write in the book about watching in the hope and then the the almost dismay I would say now what do you think about that trajectory well let me say a couple of things first of all it's easy to say this is Vladimir Putin that has taken Russia from hopes about democracy to almost thorough autocracy but in fact the Russian story is also one about the failure of institutions that after Gorbachev's reforms the Soviet Union collapsed Boris Yeltsin comes to power they have these kind of nascent democratic institutions of parliament that's supposed to work civil society a relatively Free Press hundreds of newspapers and and TV stations and Boris Yeltsin who did a lot for the country gets impatient with these institutions so he starts ruling by decree and pretty soon it's a really strong presidency now a strong presidency in the hands of Boris Yeltsin's one thing a strong presidency in the hands of Vladimir Putin is quite another one thing the American founding fathers understood is that institutions have to be there not to constrain good people but to constrain bad people they have to be equally good at empowering the people and constraining bad people and and unfortunately the Russian presidency is just too strong now there's still signs of life you may not have read the other day of Vladimir Putin lost 11 out of 12 in provincial elections hmm the only district he didn't win in the stolen election of 2016 was Moscow there Russians are different today than they were when I studied in the Soviet Union when I studied in the Soviet Union they looked at their feet when they wouldn't invite you to their homes now they travel I have them in my graduate school of business classes their undergraduates traveling and one day they are going to demand a different Russia and one day their vote will matter and one day their vote will matter again could you tell my favorite story about when the president sent you to deliver a tough message I don't even know what the message was you probably so can and what happened there this is the best so it's 2007 and things are starting to go a little sideways with the Russians and Georgians the Russians have put embargoes on Georgian products and I go to see Putin present says you got to go tell Vladimir that you know something happens to to Georgia us-russian relations are gonna be really rocky so I arrived and usually Putin would have would receive me right away I land at 4 o'clock by 5 o'clock I was at the Kremlin this day they kept saying he's not ready he's not ready he's not ready finally 7:30 comes we drive past the Kremlin we drive past where his Dodger is we drive out to this moose lodge out in the middle of nowhere and worried yeah I'm thinking where am I going here and the Russians are having a birthday party for Igor even off the National Security Adviser and Dmitry Medvedev who was Deputy Prime Minister and they are all in this big room with I'm not kidding when I say you know various heads of various animals on the wall and he says condi he says you would have given anything to be in a room like this when you were a young Soviet specialist this is the National Security Council of Russia and I thought manipulative right manipulative so I stayed for the birthday party for a little while and then I said you know President Bush just sent me with a message we need to talk so we go back into another room and it's Sergey Lavrov and Putin on one sofa and Bill burns our ambassador and me on the other sofa and I'm delivering the message and all of a sudden Putin stands up and now he's sort of peering over me and it was pure instinct I stood up to now Vladimir Putin is maybe five seven in Hills I'm more like 510 and so backed off and we got but that's who he is he he's turned from somebody and I think President Bush would would would agree with this when we first met him he was almost shy he wasn't very confident he went from sort of shy too confident too arrogant to Meg Lee maniacal and now he is a megalomaniac because not many leaders of great countries ride horses bare-chested yeah so thank God you thank God yeah don't want to give anything but he he's really he's really turned into a real problem just one more question on Russia why would he Putin Russia want to even try to interfere in our elections what is the endgame what are the things I hope to achieve one expert told me they just want chaos is that accurate I think that this was you interfered in my election and so I'm going to mess around in yours and show you that your democracy is not so perfect either he's an eye for an eye kind of guy okay and I suspect that he wanted to create chaos that they these these BOTS that they're using to for fake news and the like you know they may have wanted to influence opinion but I really think it was more about sowing chaos and unfortunately I believe our reaction has been a bit satisfying to him I fully believe we need to investigate what happened and let the chips fall where they may we certainly need to figure out how not to have systems that are so vulnerable I think we're starting to learn that social media is vulnerable in ways that we didn't understand you know people aren't good with their email people who you know kyun phishing emails so we have a lot of work to do on our own but I probably would have said you know we know you did it mm-hmm but we have absolute confidence in our institutions and in our elections and so don't do it again because by playing to this sense that we are spinning our heads are spinning off I think it's actually it's must be very satisfying to him interesting I want to maybe turn to the Middle East and the long and sort of a bigger picture you do have there's Isis there's the recent referendum that the Kurds had in Iraq but I wanted you to start with Saudi Arabia and the reason is because as I was preparing for this I was remembering and I keeping this in mind a lot gonna say Secretary Rice but condi gave a speech in Cairo in the last year of the president really and I remember her saying to this group mostly of men that you will never succeed economically you will never grow if you keep 50 percent of your population under wraps and now you see that women I guess in 18 months they're going to get to drive they have to ease their way in it's a little well the thing about the Middle East is we tend to think of all of the Middle Eastern countries is identical when it comes to questions like how repressive is the regime what does it look like for women how how much does the regime reach out to the outside world and they're very different and Saudi Arabia has been by far the most conservative it's a conservative society it is the keeper of the two great mosques and so forth but one of the most interesting paradoxes was that King Abdullah was in many ways a very progressive man in his own conservative way I remember being there with President Bush and we'd have these conversations and then I would go on my own and he would start talking about these universities that he was building he built a great university ten billion dollar endowment and he was so proud because women and men were gonna study together and they were going studied the sciences and technical subjects because he said basically our boys and girls spend too much to our boys in particular spend too much time studying religion not studying things that are practical he said now that's pretty amazing from the king of Saudi Arabia the other thing that they did was that he told me in 15 women are going to vote now the vote in Saudi Arabia isn't exactly you know the vote in the United States but it as such as it was advisory in its capacity women would vote indeed they do they run for office now and he said eventually they will drive he said but you know many of them don't want to because it's dangerous and I just sort of let that go you know but but they are making and now they've got a very young monarch the the deputy Crown Prince who is trying to push the frontiers he recognizes that Saudi Arabia can't be dependent on oil forever it's got to diversify its economy and so he's pushing but to me the most interesting thing about Saudi Arabia was you to think that you were gonna educate women over half of the grads from college in Saudi Arabia or women that you would think you were going to educate women and they were going to stay behind burkas and not drive and not not work it wasn't gonna happen and so the interesting question will be how do they make this transition how smooth is it how long does it take but there's still a lot to do in Saudi Arabia there's still too many very very reactionary clerics who are preaching to young boys there's still too many terrorists being funded there's still too many freedom fighters who are being being lashed or put in jail but there are some small signs of progress I remember being in Kuwait with the president I don't know if you'll remember this we had a little bit of time and he could go see a little league game or he could go visit some women who all ran for office for the very first time and when you came in they were very shy and they said you said the president didn't he said I am so proud of you and they said but mr. president we lost our first race and he said so did I which is great so there's there's Kuwait and somebody in the audience here and I'm sorry I don't have the name wanted to ask about your opinion about the Kurds referendum it should it be respected well it's a very difficult situation because the Kurds have been such good friends of the United States and we've been good friends of the Kurds and in their own way they have managed their affairs better than most of Iraq there's a fair amount of corruption in Kurdistan but they have fought valiantly against Isis and they have taken a lot of land in the process and so do you really ask them then to go back to just being a part of an Iraq which they never really felt completely a part of now the geostrategic answer is they have to stay in Iraq because there are also Kurds in Turkey and Kurds in Syria and if you start independent Kurdistan you're going to destroy what is left of the map of the Middle East so that's the geostrategic point secondly I believe the Kurds will be safer and stronger in a highly confederal eyes door decentralized Iraq than they will be on their own and so the issue is to find a way a structure for Iraq that gives them maximum autonomy probably considerable control over their oil resources let's their culture continue to thrive but doesn't break up Iraq as a de facto or de jure even if de facto its operating is very separate pieces the other problem is the minute you start a Kurdistan and then what happens to the Sunnis and what happens to the Shia do they lean toward Iran so we have to try to keep a rock together and and this is where the United States of America can't be absent President Bush was on the videoconference with Maliki weekly mm-hmm I was in Iraq 11 time when people are on their first steps in these very difficult situations its hand-to-hand combat to get in there and help them to settle their differences in the like and so I've been a little a little disturbed that we don't seem to be on the frontlines right now in helping the Iraqis find an answer to the Kurdish referendum what do you think of the current state of Middle East peace being with as in particularly as it regards Israel well right now we're nowhere in terms of Middle East peace the Palestinians should have taken the deal that a who - oh Mert wanted to give them in November of 2000 and no 2008 yeah we were just about out of office as a matter of fact I said to to a boss at the time I said what you should do is you should bring the deal deposit it with the President of the United States the president United States will pass it to his successor and you can start there didn't do it and they started from scratch and it's never been as close I've come to believe that Wow yes there are blocks on the Israeli side the major blocks are on the Palestinian side the Palestinians need to work on better governance they had a very good prime minister in Salam Fayyad they were making some progress in rooting out corruption having a budget online so people could see where the money was being spent economy was growing but until the Palestinians take hold of their own future Salam Fiat once said I'm gonna build my state even if I have to build it under occupation and right now the attitude is much less that way and I fear that the the careful work that we did to build a Palestinian partner for the Israelis that that is slipping but there will be another opportunity and hopefully people will get it right because there really is only one answer and that's a two-state solution and looming all over all of this is Iran and its pursuit of a nuclear weapon there's a deal that was made in the Obama administration President Trump was just it was said today in the press briefing that he will make an announcement this week and all tensions are that he's going to be city certify the deal yeah it's not a deal I would have signed if I had brought it to President Bush I think he would have thought I kind of lost my mind because it's not terribly good deal but it is what it is and if the Iranians are leading they are living up to the letter if not the spirit of the law then the United States needs to be a country that is seen to keep its obligations secondly our allies have a lot wrapped up in it so I think what you could do and maybe they'll do this this is decertified but not immediately put back the sanctions that we're taking off give some time to improve some aspects of the deal like the ability to do challenge inspections instead of having to wait 24 days until you can visit a site and people can clean it up you do have to address the fact that the Iranians are the major troublemakers in the Middle East whether it's in Yemen or Syria or even the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia or Bahrain and so there's a lot to do but I I think it's smarter not to just blow up the deal it's smarter to try to work toward something to replace it you know we had a similar situation when we came into office in 2001 what was then called the anti-ballistic missile treaty had been signed with the Soviet Union at a time when we had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other and people believed defenses if you could defend yourself that that was destabilizing because what would I do I would fire first defend myself and then I would get away with it so ballistic missile defenses missile defense was basically prohibited by the anti-ballistic missile treaty we came into office we said you know things have changed first of all nobody really worries about changed exchange of nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia missile defenses are now the key to dealing with the North Koreans and the Iranians and so we tried to negotiate with the Russians to get out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty but we gave a year's notice we took the clause that said you could withdraw we did it in an orderly fashion and as as a matter of fact by doing it in an orderly fashion we even signed a landmark agreement with the Russians a couple of years later further limiting nuclear arms so these things can be done but they have to be done in a very careful and diplomatic way can they be done in North Korea North Korea is quite a different matter we tried we tried hard you know we tried hard with the North Koreans to get a deal we came close we had to walk out because ultimately they wouldn't wouldn't do what we needed them to do but that was with his father Kim jong-il and Kim jong-il lived in a parallel universe but it was a bounded parallel universe I'm not so sure about Kim jong-un and one thing that worries me about it is people keep saying well you know he just wants his regime to survive and so you could meet his interest I'm not sure that that I he seems very isolated to me very reckless he's somebody who reached into Malaysia and killed his half-brother with VX gas when his half-brother was under Chinese protection who do you think that was a message to that was a message to the Chinese and so the Chinese may not even have as much authority as we think with the North Koreans so this is a very dangerous situation I think the administration is doing about the best you can do under these circumstances although I do think as I said on your show early earlier now Washington has a tendency lipped rhetoric get out of hand let's calm down the rhetoric a little bit and what about the either perceived or real daylight between the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and and president Trump there was a we woke up I woke up this morning I had all these things I was gonna ask you and I thought well I have to talk about Rex Tillerson and Trump and then this morning President Trump tweeted well he had done an interview with Forbes in which they'd asked him about this question of whether Tillerson had called president Trump a and President Trump said that's fake news but you know what I'll challenge him to an IQ contest I could see him making that joke the show like 98 percent joke yeah two percent real and I remember one time I don't know if you'll remember this it was a real moment of empowerment for me an understanding of leadership do you remember when there were these Raley's they were coming over and they wanted to meet with president because they didn't think that you were speaking for him and we were in the pre-brief and you were explaining to him what it was and he said okay I got it I got it and when they came in and then they sat down and President Bush didn't give him two minutes to even make their case he just stopped and said don't ever doubt that she speaks for me did you have anything else to say and that was very empowering for you but if somebody's trying to look like they're under cutting whether it's your enemy your ally your political opponents or even between the two individuals well the problem this is perhaps in foreign policy at least it's the most important relationship in government in any administration is the relationship between Secretary of State in the present and let me just put aside the Rex Tillerson thing I I'm gonna just trust that when the two of them say they have a good relationship they haven't and they had lunch today they had lunch they're working at it I think Rex Tillerson spends a lot of time he's he's not somebody who spends a lot of time publicly but I know that he's working very hard you know to isolate the North Koreans and several governments have been saying that they're actually going to expel North Korean ambassadors and stop trade so he's just getting up every day and going to work but the relationship is critical for so many reasons and when President Bush asked me to be the Secretary of State I gave him a book to read was the Dean Acheson present at the creation because Dean Acheson and his president understood that there could be no daylight between the president and the Secretary of State and indeed Dean Acheson once said that if you're not careful the State Department will tell the president the United States will constantly talk about what the president meant to say and presidents tend to resent that he said all right so that's all the way back with Dean Acheson and okay so the relationship has to be rock-solid the president has to trust the Secretary of State to know the boundaries of what's possible we talked all the time as a matter of fact when I got ready to go over to the State Department I said the president how're we gonna stay in touch because you know I used to be right down the hall I'd walk to your office six seven times a day he said well you know I might not remember to call you but you've been called me and I did all the time and I we checked signals all the time that way when I was out on the road I didn't have to phone home you know because the Secretary of State has to be a presence out there really representing the United States and I I knew that I could do that could we talk about a good news story when it comes to democracy and something that President Bush and you were instrumental in and that is Liberia which doesn't get a lot of attention or credit but it's a really remarkable story going back all the way till 2003 when you went to him with an article from the New York Times well Liberia is a real success story and it's a success story of American policy really so the short story is that in 2003 there was a terrible warlord named Charles Taylor and he was just ravaging the country and he was using child soldiers and there was a picture of one of these boys on the front page of the New York Times the kid could not have been more than maybe 10 years old he had an ak-47 in one hand and a teddy bear bear backpack in the other and I took that to President Bush and I said we have to do something about this and he said what do you think it would take and I said oh you know some Marines and he said they said I don't think so but you know what he asked the Pentagon what would it take to to deal with this warlord Charles Taylor and we had the backing of the African Union we had very strong partner in John qu4 who was the President of Ghana at the time and the head of the the West African organization and the Pentagon came in and said two divisions said two divisions to deal with a warlord I don't think so they came back eventually we put 100 Marines at the airport 100 Marines at the Seaport we did float a large American flotilla out there just so that they would know there was something to bury and Charles Taylor look only right I mean a quickly is a matter fact the African leaders went and got him and put him on a plane the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the first African first woman to be elected president on the African continent mrs. Bush and I went to her inauguration I will never forget it was hot as Hades you the the you know the there were potholes that you could lose the car and it was just a sad that country but she's giving her speech and she says and the African leaders are all lined up there and they're all applauding everything she says and then she says and today I will have my finances and the finances of every one of my cabinet officers posted online they didn't applaud that so she was changing things now why not only did we intervene but we then help help them and they became a Millennium Challenge country and by the way the Millennium I write about the Millennium Challenge in the book because the Millennium Challenge recognized something that we sometimes talk about democracy it's great to get the institutions right and so forth but ultimately you got to deliver for the people and particularly when you're a democratic government you have to be shown as delivering not the United States just coming in with large aid packages and the like and so the Millennium Challenge took countries that were trying to govern democratically tried to cover wisely and gave them large financial aid packages to help with issues like titling the land so that you could combine agricultural plants or plots or building electrical grids so that these lis houses there's something interesting it was when you were at the we were there in Liberia and she talked about all the kids that weren't going to school and she explained that they weren't going to school because the parents were sending about to help get food for the day and then we used the USDA the Department of Agriculture to help provide breakfast and lunch and that made sure she said that then there was like a 98 percent attendance rate and not go to school right so you have to help it's not just you let them have an election and then you drop it elections are the first step in democracy they're not even the most important step I mean they're the moment when people get to express themselves but now you've got to build those institutions now you've got to build real capability and so through a Millennium Challenge and others we did that and I want to say one thing about foreign assistance in this regard I know there's a lot of debate about foreign assistance is it wasted and so forth but one reason the Millennium Challenge was set up this way was we had very strong indicators about whether you were fighting corruption whether you were empowering women whether you were doing health care for your people and I think we were using American taxpayers dollars wisely now we're having a debate now where it seems people think if you ask Americans how much do we spend on foreign assistance they will say 25 percent of the budget and I always say too much they are too much but people will honestly say 25 percent of the budget it's between 1% and one and a half percent depending on what you count and it is money worth spending on good governance because when we talk about democracy I always thought I always think that there's a moral call a moral case right if we honestly believe that these values are universal then it can't be true for us and not them and we're either living a lie about our own values or we have to care about those values at that that's the moral case no man woman or child should ever have to live in tyranny as president said in his second inaugural but there's a practical k-stew democracies don't fight each other democracies don't send child soldiers into battle democracies don't invade their neighbors democracies don't harbor terrorists and so we have a reason to want to see the number of well governed democracies grow for our own security and our own our own well-being so whatever we can do to empower people who are trying and you know I don't particularly like the word democracy promotion I like the word democracy support because there are always people in those countries who are looking to have the same freedoms we we do and you need to support them we only have about eight minutes and 22 seconds left of course I have so much I want to ask you about I do I will say that there's several questions that came in from the audience I know the answer to this so we can keep this one short will you ever run for office No thank you very much I remember you talked about when was it that I read that you talked about maybe was in your other book about how you saw President Bush on the campaign trail and it gave him energy and it drains you and me he was raring to go after five six seven events I just wanted to go the hotel here's the question I would like to ask so we've talked about a lot of places around the world we're all pretty engaged people following things in the world what are we missing like what are what concerns you or what are you hopeful about that we aren't necessarily seen on the front page of the papers or even if you dig a little deeper well let me give you two and then bring it back to America because I'm mostly worried that America will abdicate its responsibility to to make sure that our world is peaceful prosperous and free if America is committed we'll get through all of these crises but right now we have the re-emergence of what I call in the book the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse populism nativism isolationism and protectionism and they tend to ride together and they're not just riding in the United States they're riding in places like Germany who are 13.5% for the alternative for Germany hard right populist movement that I don't think anybody ever thought would win enough seats to be in the parliament in Germany and even in places where they're not winning elections they are changing the conversation so nobody wants to send up for immigrants nobody wants to stand up for free trade and we did this once after World War one and the people who created the system in world after world war two said not again this time the international economy is going to be a growing economy so that it's not a fixed pie so that it's not a zero-sum game we're gonna have free trade and with free trade everybody's going to be more prosperous and it succeeded brilliantly and they believed in free peoples that free peoples wouldn't fight each other so they built a free Germany and a free Japan and that's paid off who would have thought Germany and Japan would never fight again and it was all protected by American military power this time permanently an article 5 an attack upon one is an attack upon all a defense treaty with Japan with South Korea willingness to defend the ceilings and I know that it's been burdensome and I know that Americans are sometimes tired I was in the Oval with President Bush in August of 2008 and in case you didn't know the polls weren't so great for the Bush administration in August of 2008 and he said I don't believe these polls he said you know I we couldn't be I said mr. president they're tired of us all right I said it's been vigilance and war and terrorism they're tired of us but you know great powers can't get tired because when great powers get tired it isn't Germany that steps up for Brazil or India no it's Vladimir Putin and it's the Iranians and it's Isis which finally I think we've we're close to defeating so that vacuum is what I fear most it's it's not a specific crisis here there but it's the vacuum that's born of this sense that we are too lacking confidence too weak too small not compassionate enough to care about them out there will lose if that becomes America I have so many stories that I love to tell about times with President Bush you want to pick one of your favorites and we'll end on the it could be funny to be meaningful moving okay I'll I'll give you two okay one funny and one meaningful I'll start with meaningful so when we were in the Oval Office trying to decide or he was trying to decide whether or not to launch PEPFAR mmm-hmm there was one final meeting and it was me as national security adviser Josh Bolden it was OMB at the time and Mike Gerson and a few other people and when we first came into office in 2001 it had been the case that people were saying ant of it antiretrovirals couldn't cure and so was it worth doing and the NIH and Tony Fauci and others started to talk about the fact that you might not be able to cure but you could extend life and the president went around and he asked each person then should we do this and I related to him that my mother had first had cancer when I was 15 and she lived another 15 years and how much it meant that I had my mother when I grew up and she could see her daughter become a professor at Stanford and so forth especially after where you started of where we started and so she could see that so you were better than the others yeah I guess so so we we were able to do that and then I president went around he asked everybody and then he just said because you know the budget people had their well you know this and that and budget and he said you know from those assumed a lot is given much is expected quoting from Matthew and that was a moment of presidential leadership that wasn't just presidential it was America at its best America at its most passionate America and recognizing that it could do things that others couldn't and I've never been more proud and it succeeded and it succeeded and if you haven't had a chance to look at the results we're getting with PEPFAR and vaster Burks is here who's been a tremendous supporter and guardian of that program through multiple administration's now you need to see what it's done I will remember remember going to Uganda and hearing a child's choir a choir of orphans AIDS orphans sing god bless america mm-hmm and so that's it now the funny one okay so even in difficult times funny things happen so we invaded Afghanistan in October first week in October the asia-pacific Economic Council was supposed to meet in Shanghai on Friday September the 13th I'm sorry on on yes I'm Friday September the 14th and so obviously we didn't go because of September 11th it's just 2001 but the president said we're going to make that trip and so we were in Shanghai that first week after we'd invaded Afghanistan and so every morning we would have a video conference with the president : me and Andy card in China and like this trying to make sure the Chinese couldn't hear and then we would have a vice president Cheney and Steve Hadley my deputy on the other side so it's 12 hour time difference so this particular day we're getting up in the morning they're getting there it's nighttime there and vice president comes on and he looks just great you can see it through them and as only the vice president could do he in tones mr. president the White House detectors have detected botulinum toxin there is no known cure no known antidote and we're all going to die and the president said dick what was that again and he said well there's no known antidote and those of us who were exposed are going to die so : says what's the exposure time hoping he wasn't in the White House but of course it turns out he was and so we all sort of sink back in their chairs and so president says go call Hadley and find out what's going on so I called Steve Hadley Steve is the kind of has this Midwestern sense of humor Steve says well yes we've sent the samples to the CDC he said in it's entirely possible that it's you know that it's a false report a false alarm he said let me put it this way if the mice are feet down we're fine if the mice of feet up were toast so we're in China we're having lunch with the Chinese 24 hours later and I get a note that Steve Hadley is on the phone so I go and I passed by the president's table and I say Steve Hadley cell phone because so I go to Steve get on the phone Steve says good news the mice are feet down it was a false alarm so I go back by the president's table and I say mr. president good news the mice are feet down he says thank goodness the mice are feet down at this point they translate for the Chinese I'm sure the Chinese are thinking what code are these people but even in tough times there are light-hearted moments that you can remember well the the mice surely are feet down thank you so much everybody let's give a round of applause funny right [Applause] Thank You dr. ice and Dana for being here there's absolutely inspirational Thank You President Bush and mrs. Bush for surrounding yourself with such awesome people that we get to host here you are an inspiration to the work we do here at the bush center and here in the community to work day by day on issues like free trade on issues like responsible immigration and democracy we're going to take this show on the road to new york to our spirit of liberty conference next thursday where we're going to be reaffirming why democracy and so important to the United States and heart leadership mean something to the rest of the world so thank you for setting such a great example the the both of these great authors have their books outside on your way out that you can that you can find also if you haven't had a chance the portraits of courage exhibit President Bush's inspirational paintings of our veterans will be here through October 17th and next weekend will be honored to host as a celebration of the last weekend some veterans who are who are the subjects of those paintings who will be here to sign books and to tell their stories you can check our website or engage event on November 5th with the other two new authors Barbara and Jenna and their new book that unfortunately is sold out but if you don't have tickets you can live stream it through the bush Center Facebook page and remember a thank you to all the members who are here and for those who aren't members it's great to be a member because you get first notice of all these great events thank you everybody for coming I look forward to welcoming you at the next event [Applause]

Channel: TheBushCenter

Views: 23,016

Rating: 4.6846471 out of 5

Keywords: dana perino, condoleezza rice, george w. bush institute, george w. bush presidential center, george w. bush

Id: t1HF82F2QVc

Length: 59min 24sec (3564 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2017