c-span.org/radioapps. now condoleezza rice recount her tenure in the bush administration where she was national security advisor from 2001-2005 and as the 66th secretary of state for 2005 to 2009. this is about 50 minutes. [applause]] it is one thing to learn about american history in the classroom and another to absorb these lessons up close and personal. one of the twenty-first century's chief architects of american foreign policy. the leadership lecture series was established by ambassador tim cobb to commemorate her husband's chuck cobb's 50th birth day. ..

>> given to the first 300 students who attended this year's event. [applause] now, the university takes no credit for doing this. i want to thank our very good friend, mitch kaplan, of books and books. the university met with him recently to discuss launching a new partnership to bring speakers to campus, and one week later he called to say that we were going to have an opportunity to host secretary rice's first public book tour event. mitch, i think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship. thank you very much. [laughter] [applause] now, the cobbs have sponsored

other distinguished speakers, casper weinberger, bob galvin, ross perot, mba commissioner david stern, david gurgin. sue and chuck have dedicated their careers and energy to serving their country and community in a variety of ways. between them, they are a formidable diplomatic corps that spans from iceland to jamaica to d.c. to tallahassee and miami. sue served as u.s. ambassador to jamaica from 2001 to 2005 during the same time when secretary rice served as national security adviser and u.s. secretary of state. governor jeb bush appointed her secretary of state of florida from 2005 to 2007. she's taught at the foreign service institute and co-chaired the u.s. department of state's mandatory seminars for newly-appointed ambassadors. and an interesting twist, she's both an alumna of stanford university where secretary rice is a very distinguished member

of the faculty and former provost and the university of miami school of law. chuck cobb was the u.s. ambassador to the republic of iceland during the administration of george h.w. bush, and during the reagan administration he served as undersecretary and assistant secretary at the u.s. department of commerce where he was responsible for trade, development, export promotion and international travel and tourism. and he was appointed by florida's governors, jeb bush and charlie crist, to serve on statewide boards. both sue and chuck serve on the board of directors of the consul of american ambassadors. while we can't claim chuck, he's a longtime member and past chairman of the board of the university of miami's board of trustees. please, welcome miami's diplomatic dynamic duo, the ambassadors cobb. [applause]

>> thank you, president shalala. dr. rice, ambassador cobb -- [laughter] guests, we're very pleased to have all of you here. this whole thing has sort of unfolded around the interest of my husband in leadership. so when we have been able to have outstanding leaders come through this area, we've arranged to have the university of miami students and our guests participate. and that's been, um, an extraordinary pleasure. this year we hit the jackpot. [laughter] with condoleezza rice. we do have a relationship that goes back, as you know, i think, dr. rice was a provost at stanford and is back at stanford now at the woodrow wilson institute.

chuck and i spent eight years on campus at stanford. it was not because we couldn't graduate. [laughter] but that's a different story. um, and we have many mutual friends from our service in government and stanford and elsewhere. and, of course, we also had the privilege of service to our country at very consequential times. one of the things that i enjoy thinking about as leadership, also, and i think of dr. rice as a transformational leader. in fact, i think of president shalala and ambassador cobb as transformational leaders. and you might think about and ask what are the common traits. vision, contextual knowledge, understanding the environment in which you're operating, communication and motivational

skills. they're challenging but empowering, rock solid integrity, unusual determination and perseverance, perseverance and perseverance. well, as you might guess, i'm a great admirer of dr. rice. not quite as much as moammar gadhafi. i don't have a scrapbook. [laughter] [applause] i do have an enormous regard for dr. rice and am very, very pleased that she's here and to do her formal introduction, like to invite ambassador cobb to the stage. [applause] >> good morning, everybody. thank you, president shalala and

my wife, for those nice, nice comments. [laughter] and before i introduce condoleezza rice, i want to, i want to share with all of you a favoritism i have, a bias that i have. and this bias is that i have a strong affinity for smart, strong, powerful, successful and charismatic women leaders. [applause] and as evidence of that -- [applause] and as evidence of that, i've been married to one of those ladies for 52 years. but as second -- [applause] but as second evidence of that, i had the pleasure to chair the search committee for the university of miami president, and be our first choice -- and our first choice by far was donna shalala because she had all of those skills and all of

those talents. [applause] and then, and then thirdly, i'm on the board of the woodrow wilson center, and i had the honor to chair its search committee recently. and our first choice was condoleezza rice who, clearly, has all those skills as i'll talk a little more about in a moment. [applause] unfortunately, we couldn't get her away from stanford, and we couldn't get her away from writing this great book. and so we were successful in encouraging congresswoman jane harmon who is a congresswoman from california and also a very charismatic, driven, powerful, wonderful, smart lady. so it's quite obvious, i think, from all of this that i really do have this bias.

and for that reason it's really an opportunity and a pleasure for me to introduce the most successful woman in the world. and i really do believe that. so you've heard from my wife about leadership skills and, clearly, condoleezza rice has all of those. but in my opinion, the most important leadership skill she has is -- and i think all successful leaders have this -- is the ability to bring people together, to team build, to seek a common ground. and no one is more skilled at this than condoleezza rice. as national security adviser, as you all know, it's her job to bring really diverse personalities together. so in her case it was dick cheney, the vice president, colin powell, the secretary of state, and don rumsfeld, secretary of defense. really different personalities,

really strong personalities, a lot of tension in the room as you will read in this book. but she brought a consensus, and under her leadership and the president's leadership they made some of the most important decisions of this century. and because of that great ability to team build. now, she also used that skill as secretary of state and dealt with some really tough problems with palestine and israel on one hand, and then it was pakistan and india on another, and then day after day countries that were, had really diverse and different, fundamental differences. again, no one was better in bringing everybody together than dr. condoleezza rice. at age 38, secretary rice was named the provost at stanford, and as you heard, that's our alma mater. she was the youngest provost in

stanford's history. she showed exceptional leadership skills at stanford that since that time universities all over the country are trying to get her to be their president. but, again, they were as unsuccessful as i was earlier of getting her. she is a leader with incredibly diverse skills. she's a concert pianist, a sports officionado, and because of her leadership skills has been offered to be the commissioner of the pac-12 and considered as the commissioner for the nfl. she serves on the board of hewlett-packard, charles schwab, transamerica and many other boards in corporate and conservativic organizations. so, ladies and gentlemen, it's my really distinct pleasure, and i think no higher honor does this university have than to have a leader with so many talents and experiences. and so i present to you the former secretary of state and

the national security adviser, condoleezza rice. [applause] >> thank you. [applause] >> madam secretary, welcome. >> thank you very much. >> how long have i been inviting you here? >> a few years, a few years. [laughter] >> most of our questions today were submitted by students. and let me start with the first one. one of our students asked, how do i get to be secretary of state? >> good question. [laughter] well, relate me just start -- let me just start by thanking you very much. i have known president shalala as secretary shalala, but also as my friend, donna, so thank you very much for having me here at the u, right? [cheers and applause]

i want to thank my good friends, the cobbs, the ambassadors cobb, for their service to the country and for their extraordinary friendship as well. and so, and thanks to you, university of miami students, for having me here. well, so how do you become secretary of state? all right. you start as a failed piano major, that's how you start. [laughter] i actually went to college to be a concert pianist. i studied piano from the age of 3. there was never any doubt that's what i was going to do. and in the summer of my sophomore year, i went to the aspen music festival school which a lot of prodigies were there, and there were 12-year-olds who could play from sight what i could play after one year. i was 17. i thought i was going to end up teaching 13-year-olds to murder

beethoven, and fortunately, i wandered into a course on international politics, and it was taught by a man jailed joseph carville who was madeleine albright's father. and he opened up the world of diplomacy and eastern europe to me, and all of a sudden i knew what i wanted to be, i wanted to be a soviet specialist. so the first lesson of how you get to where i've, where i am is you find something that you absolutely love to do. and so i would say to each and every one of you as students, find your passion. not what job you want, not what career you want, but what you're passionate about, what's going to make you get up every day and want to go and do that. secondly, if you're fortunate, your passion and your talents will come together, and i went on then to become a professor at stanford. and i met when i was a young professor, um, in a seminar at stanford a man named brent scocroft who had been the national security adviser to

president gerald ford and was, would become the national security adviser to george h.w. bush. he took an interest in my career, and when president george h.w. bush was elected, he took me with him to be the white house soviet specialist. and i was fortunate to be the white house soviet specialist at the end of the cold war and it, frankly, doesn't get much better than that. [laughter] but the second lesson is, find people who are interested in you and in your career who can help to guide you and open up opportunities. we sometimes say i want to get there on my own. nobody gets there absolutely on their own. there are always mentors. and there's another important lesson. sometimes we say you have to have role models and mentors who look like you. well, if i'd been waiting for a black woman soviet specialist mentor -- [laughter] i would still be waiting. [laughter] so your mentors, your role models can come in any color, shape or size, just find somebody who really cares about you and cares about your career.

and the final part of that story is that when in 1990 mikhail gorbachev came to the white house, and we were sitting together on the lawn of the white house in marine one, the presidential helicopter, getting ready to take off for california. just me, gorbachev, his wife and the secret service, i thought, i'm really glad i changed my major. [laughter] and so if you find your passion, if you find people who support you, if you work hard, and if you don't worry too much about what comes next, incredible opportunities do open themselves to you. finally, i'd say get involved in politics at some point, you know? find a candidate you like, work for them. ultimately, that's really how i got to be secretary of state. i worked for george w. bush, and i became his secretary of state. so those are some of the thoughts i have, but the most important, start right now. find your passion. [applause] >> wonderful.

let's talk a little about the organization of decision making and your role in the nsc, the national security consul. that role was almost painful for me to read it, it was herding cats. if you were to advise now after your experience in that job in particular a president of the united states, would you suggest to them that one characteristic of the members of that team whether it's the secretary of defense, treasury, even the vice president would be gets along well with others? >> yeah. well, that might eliminate a fair number of people in washington, so i'd be careful about that criteria. [laughter] no, there's no doubt that we had very strong personalities. but i hope that i gave the impression in the book that they were debates about substance, these were not personal issues. nonetheless, we got along just fine until the most stressful

times. and the most stressful times were around the war on terror and around iraq. and so perhaps the lesson is that in so-called normal times, to the degree that anything's ever normal in decision making in washington, you can -- it is important to have different voices. you can even do with some tension. but, you know, when things get really tough, it is easier if people get along. and that, perhaps, is the lesson that i would say to the president. it's a new president. you can do fine with personalities that may clash if things are going well. when they get rough, it's a lot harder. >> uh-huh. let me follow up on that question. it's the personalities, but it's also different points, very strong points of view. some black and white, some more nuanced as you described it in your book. >> right. >> does the fact that each political party has kind of this big ten strategy, does that need

to be reflected in the foreign policy leadership, or can you just bring people in to consult with that? so i'm pushing you pretty hard on how you put the team together. >> right. well, it is a really fine line because if you put a team together where people have views that are too similar, you get group think. >> yep. >> and that's not a good thing. when i was secretary of state, i actually had a couple of curmudgeons on my staff who would challenge me about everything i wanted to do. because i have always thought if you're constantly -- and this is true in school -- if you're constantly in the company of people who say amen to everything you say, find other company because you don't actually test your assumptions in that way. so i would tend to err in the direction of people who do have strong views, who do express them, but who can also put them aside, ultimately, and find a way to work together. >> and within the political party, both the republican and

democratic party, they do have people with widely different views. if you were actually advising a president, you can't anticipate that you're going to go through tough times. >> right. >> so what characteristics of that foreign policy team, in past years we've had people on foreign policy teams that were lawyers but not necessarily the substantive expertise that you have. >> no, that's very true. we actually had on our foreign policy team when you think about it, we had quite experienced foreign policy hands. don had been secretary of defense before, vice president cheney had been secretary of defense and chief of staff in the white house, colin powell had been deputy national security adviser, i'd been in the white house before, so we actually had a lot of expertise. i'm really to this day not quite sure why sometimes the personalities didn't gel, and i'm not actually sure -- i don't actually think it was observable in, before we got to washington.

that's why i say i think it was the times that perhaps tested us. but i would say to a president who's choosing a foreign policy team do think about talking to people about internal dynamics. and, because it can get a bit -- >> think about the team part. >> think about the team party as well as as -- have strong views, because strong views are important. you don't want a president who's just hearing one side of the story. but think about the team dynamics as well. >> interesting. let's talk a little about latin america, the caribbean. do you think it makes sense to focus on latin america and the caribbean as a region in developing u.s. policy given the fact that so many, the countries differ in their stage of development, and so many of them their issues are really global issues? >> yes, yes. well, there's one sense in which i do think we want to think about latin america and the caribbean as a region. matter of fact, i would say even the western hemisphere which is that there is a kind of natural

affinity for trade policy. we do share some problems of just the kind of transnational borders of trying to deal with trafficking in persons, trafficking in arms, trafficking in drugs, and so there are reasons to work as a region. i also think that since the organization of american states actually has a democratic charter, we should have a view of our hemisphere -- first and foremost, your neighborhood -- as being democratic. but you make a very good point. once you get beyond those sort of big, um, categories you really are talking about countries that are very different in how they interact with the globe. brazil thinks of itself, of course, as a regional leader. but brazil is also one of the most important emerging economies for the whole global economy. it is one of them, as we call them, the bricks, one of the emerging economies that has a

chance to really structure how the international economy is going to look going forward. when you think about countries like, of course, obviously, the united states has a global role, but when you think even about countries along the pacific rim of latin america, they may connect more to the economies of asia. i was always struck when i would go to something called the summit of the americas which was really about latin america and the caribbean, and, you know, we would have these discussions, and then hugo chavez would take off, and everybody would sort of close their ears and whatever. [laughter] but then almost a week or two weeks later we would go to the asia pacific economic council, apec, and there it's the pacific rim countries of chile and up the pacific rim all the way to canada and all the way out through japan and china and korea, and the conversation was

completely different. it was about global trade, it was about freeing trade. and so i actually always thought that in that sense the countries had more in common with their asian counterparts than they had with their latin american counterparts. >> is how they perceive themselves at a stage of development significant there? >> i think it is. because if you look at places like chile, now quite developed in many ways, colombia getting there in terms of development, you know, a country like brazil is interesting because on the one hand it is leading the global -- one of the leaders in the global economy, but with huge income distribution difficulties that keep it really more on the developing country side. if you look at some of the poorest countries in, say, central america like guatemala, for instance, you're talking about places where you can't even reach the farmers in the highlands by highway. and so their problems are to try to build infrastructure so that they can join the 20th century

economy, forget the 21st century economy. so, yes, you have radically different levels of development. but when you think about it, you have radically different levels of development within countries. look at the north of mexico and the interior of the country, and you have very different levels of development even within countries. >> does a secretary of state think of cuba differently than as part of the region because of the domestic politics and the relationship? >> well, i think we think of cuba differently because it is the one country in the oas that can't even take a seat at the table because it's not, it doesn't have a democratically-elected president. and, unfortunately, we have a history with cuba. of castro's decision to install soviet nuclear capability that threatened the territory of the united states, highly anti-american regime there. and so there are foreign policy reasons principally that we have a different relationship with cuba. but my hope is that in the

larger democratization that is going on across the world, that the cuban people simply can't be left behind. it absolutely has to be the case that when fidel castro goes, the cuban people get a chance to elect their next government, it's not just handed somehow to raul castro. [applause] >> that was a set-up question. [laughter] both the national security adviser and, certainly, the secretary of state are almost firefighters part of the time. you get woken up in the middle of the night. someone does something stupid either within your own organization or around the world. >> yeah. >> how do you anticipate the future though? there's some evidence that while there was the basis for the arab spring or even others predicted the soviet collapse, how do you anticipate the future when you're in those particular

leadership roles for both the president, but more importantly, for the country? and how do you organize yourself to do that? >> yes. well, obviously, you try to have, um, experts who are keeping an eye on events. and in this regard having embassies with people who really know the place and can get out into the community. one of the things i tried to get foreign service officers to do was not stay in the embassy, not talk to other foreign officials, but get out in the country. get a sense for what the conversation is on the street in the country. and that sometimes will give you a bit of early warning. secondly, on the arab spring, i think we knee something was coming. the -- we knew something was coming. the freedom agenda that we launched about the middle east, president bush had given his second inaugural address in which he talked about the need for there to be no man, woman or child who lives in tyranny including in the middle east.

i gave a speech at the american university of cairo saying that egypt needed to lead this revolution. and i can remember going to see mubarak the morning before i ghei the speech and saying -- gave the speech and saying to him, you know, mr. president, get out ahead of this. get reforms started before your people are in the streets. because what you could feel by being in the middle east was the kind of seething anger that was growing against authoritarians who were corrupt, authoritarians who were planning die fastic successions from themselves to their sons. you could sense that mubarak or ben ali in tunisia were increasingly isolated with people who were telling them their people loved them, but on the streets their people didn't love them. so you had -- i really, we had a sense that this was coming. what you can never know is what is the spark. that the spark would have been a man, a shopkeeper self-emulating

in tunisia is what you can't see. so you see the kindling gathering, but you don't know when it's going to ignite. and the best that you can do is expect that it might ignite anytime, and try to get ahead of it. so trying to get, particularly, our friends in the middle east to reform before their people were in the streets was our way of trying to get ahead of what happened, ultimately, in egypt and in tunisia and other places. >> talk a little about the collapse of the soviet union in terms of what scholars knew, and you were right there. >> i was. and we used to laugh that people would say gorbachev is bound to fall from power. thank you, but when? it was the issue because you -- a general sense that things are going bad is not enough. people knew that the infrastructure, political, economic, social of the soviet union was weak. i went to the soviet union for the first time in 1979 to study

language. i was there for an extended period of time, and i was a student of the soviet military. and i remember thinking, you know, i had this image of the sow yet military as -- soviet military as ten feet tall. and i remember going into a store to buy some food for my family, and they were doing the computation of the prices on an abacus. and i hadn't seen an abacus since second grade in birmingham, alabama. [laughter] and i thought, well, this isn't a very developed place. and you start to get a sense that something's really wrong there. so i think soviet specialists knew that the infrastructure was weak. it took, however, a true believer in kind of marxist ideology that it could triumph over the fact that people were estonian or ukrainian, and it took somebody who believed you could reform the soviet union. gorbachev tried to reform it, and then it collapsed.

but i can tell you that still in 1990 -- the soviet union collapses on december 25, 1991. in 1990 when we were unifying germany in the fall of 1990, i don't think anybody thought that the collapse of the soviet union was a year away. >> one of our students wanted to make sure i asked about social media and how the foreign policy establishment now follows social media around the world. >> yes. >> um, and whether that's part of the intelligence gathering. >> it is now. in fact, when i went to state, i took with me someone named sean mccormack from the white house who was very interested in what was then kind of an emerging social media. there was not then any twitter or facebook, but people were on chat rooms, so we started to understand better what was going on there. i also asked a former student of mine, a gentleman named jared cohen who would later on go to work for secretary clinton, to

go and start thinking about did we want to even try to help people to use social media to democratize. so he created groups of friends who would, for instance, people who'd helped to overthrow terrorism in colombia who could chat with people in the middle east who were trying to deal with terrorism. so we were starting to use social media. what i've begun to understand now, of course, social media's an accelerant, right? it's not the cause, but it's an accelerant. but what's very interesting is what's happening with social media in china. because the regime is doing everything it can to control the internet. it's terrified of the internet. in fact, hacking into servers to try to find that last human rights advocate who might be online. and apparently, social media is going wild in china. and the regime is not so certain

that maybe it's, maybe it's not a bad thing that people have a way to vent through social media. so you remember the story of this young girl that was run over, um, in the streets, and people -- that exploded into the social media in china. but i would say to the regime, you know, it's one thing to think that people will just event, but eventually they will vent and want to organize to do something about it. and so social media, i think, is going to continue to have a huge impact on how revolutions, how reform, how democratization takes place. >> and so foreign policy experts in the years ahead are going to have to follow -- >> absolutely. >> -- social media. >> absolutely. >> another dimension, plus our intelligence. >> right. i think it will be one of the most important sources of understanding the pulse of what is going on beneath governments because governments are not irrelevant by any means to this, but populations are more

empowered than they've ever been by social media. >> i have to ask you about iraq because one of the things you do is put a broader context and a broader justification on the reasons to go into iraq. and you describe it, i think, as a kind of imminent security risk. >> yes. >> and my question is, um, first, how did you change the collection of, um, intelligence information after your experience in iraq? because, clearly, there were real questions about how accurate the information was. >> yes. well, the most important thing that we did was to reorganize the intelligence agencies. and by the way, both as a result of the intelligence failure prior to 9/11 and the intelligence failure with iraq. because in the prior case we had a wall between domestic intelligence which the fbi did and external intelligence which the cia did. and when they crossed, as they

did in 9/11, we couldn't talk to, they couldn't talk to one another. in iraq i think we -- >> excuse me, condi. would you explain because many of the students may not understand -- >> sure. >> -- why we have that, you're a teacher, why we have that gap between the fbi and the cia. >> absolutely. it was, the gap, the wall as i like to call it, was there for very good and legitimate reasons which was that we did not want our foreign intelligence agency, the cia, being active inside the country and, perhaps, spying to use that word on domestic events, on american citizens and so forth. so the cia was kept to a foreign intelligence agency. the fbi which operated under rules and laws, think "law and order," the fbi was the internal intelligence agency. well, just to give you one example, a few nights before 9/11 a telephone call was made

in san diego by one of the men who would ultimately be one of the suicide hijackers to afghanistan. but we couldn't track across that boundary because we didn't want the tracking of phone calls inside the united states by foreign intelligence. so would i like to have known what he said a couple of days before 9/11? when we realized that, of course, we had an internal security problem, the attack on our internal security, we had to sew up that gap so that the cia and what they knew about what was going on outside the country and the fbi and what they knew about what was going on inside the country could talk to one another. and that's what the so-called patriot act that you've probably read about actually, it closed that seam. so that was one intelligence problem. the iraq intelligence problem was a little bit different but, also, structural. we had, um, as many -- depending

on how you count them -- as between 15 and 17 different intelligence agencies in the united states. defense department has one, energy department has one, space department has one, the cia has one, etc. the cia was one. the person who was in charge of all of those as the director of central intelligence was also the head of the cia. so we had this strange situation in which we had all this different intelligence reporting, but obviously, the director of cia was human. he trusted his own intelligence agency more than all of these others that he was supposed to be over. and we found that some of the counterevidence about what was going on in iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs probably didn't get the airing and the hearing that it might have. so we created the director of national intelligence who is not the director of the cia, he's a separate person, to cull

intelligence, help the president understand when there are disagreements in the intelligence agency and give more of a total picture of what's going on with intelligence. so that was the big reform that was made. >> you also have talked in at least one speech that i know of about the anticipatory self-defense as part of the context for making the decision to go into iraq. and i really want to ask you when you examine the iraq situation and there was a discussion, did you look at other countries as well? because if you look at the list of justifications, you could put those on iran as well. and so why iraq rather than iran? and did you look at more than one country? >> yes. we looked -- iraq was suis generous, in this our view. it was unique. and it was unique because we had been to war against saddam

hussein in 1991. he'd signed an armistice, he was systematically violating that armistice. he was found in 1991 to have been one year from a crude nuclear device. he had used weapons of mass destruction against the iranians and against his own people. the constraints that were put on him were starting to break down including, by the way, the fact that we were flying so-called no-fly zones to keep his air force on the ground. he was shooting at our aircraft practically every day. i can remember the president asking don rumsfeld, what do we do if he gets a lucky shot and brings down an american pilot? so we were really in a state of suspended hostilities with iraq, not in a state of peace with iraq. in 1998 president clinton had actually launched cruise missiles against iraq, and he -- the inspectors who were supposed to be keeping his weapons of mass destruction programs under control were, left the country.

so he was different for his having dragged the region into war several times including us, the fact that he was continuing, we believed, to build weapons of mass destruction and according to the intelligence agencies had reconstituted his chemical weapons, reconstituted his biological weapons and was on his way to reconstituting his nuclear programs. he had tried to assassinate president george h.w. bush, he was shooting at our aircraft, he put 400,000 people in mass graves. he was considered the biggest threat in the middle east. as bad as north korea was, as bad as iran was, they were not in a category like iraq where there were 16 security council resolutions that said that he was a threat to international peace and security. >> does that also account for the need to focus on the israeli/palestinian issue, that they're also suis generous in the sense that it's unique compared to other parts of the world? >> yes. and the israeli/palestinian

issue while it isn't the key to peace in the middle east and to a different kind of middle east, it is a key to a different kind of middle east. now, any student of international politics from the time that i was your age and in college which, admittedly, is a long time ago, but from that time when you took a course on international politics, people started it with the most volatile region in the world is the middle east. and that's still true today. so people have been trying to, to do something about that for all of this time. the israeli/palestinian issue is one of the core issues that needs to be resolved to get rid of that volatility in the middle east. >> and every administration has struggle withed it. >> every administration has struggled with it. >> do you see hope out there? >> i do. i describe in the book that ehud olmert who was the prime minister of israel when i was secretary of state and mahmoud abbas, the current president of the pal palestinian authority,

were pretty close to a deal in 2008. a very good deal put on the table by olmert. olmert was in political and legal trouble, so abbas did not take it up for a variety of reasons. but the reason i actually wrote about it is i wanted to suggest that it is not a hopeless cause. there is an answer here, there is a two-state solution that is available, but time is not on the side of either of them. >> uh-huh. i'd like to go back to the soviet union because given your expertise about the soviet union, how do you see russia developing over the next few years? and do you think that their importance in the world will continue to increase, perhaps even suppressing china? >> yes. i think the russians are in trouble in terms of global standing, and i think they know it. you know, russia is a, the russian economy is 80% dependent on exports of oil, gas and minerals. that's not a modern economy. um, and i'll tell you a little story about, that shows how much

that oil, gas and minerals is linked up with personal fortunes, political power and the state. i was at the australian foreign minister's house one day. we were having a meeting about energy policy. and he was going around asking people about energy policy. so the russian says, well, he says, we understand that our oil and gas fields are technologically behind, but no foreigner will ever own russian oil and gas, he said. he said, so we're going to buy the technology from welcome wesl companies. so i had been a director of the chevron corporation, and i said, so, don't you understand that their advantage is, actually, in their technology? they're not going to sell you their technology to make you a better competitor. and he said, oh, that's a really good point. [laughter] and then he said, are you still a director of chevron? i was the secretary of state. [laughter] but in russia, dmitry medvedev,

who was the deputy prime minister, was also the chairman of the gas industry. so state and economy and politics and personal fortunes all linked up together. by the way, there was a fair amount of political violence too. now that mr. putin has decided he is the once and future president of russia, i think the chance that russia is going to break out of that and build on ore strengths that it might have including a very smart population, those have receded. and i think, unfortunately, russia will not find greater strength in the international economy. it's pretty much an economy that's dependent on the price of oil to do well. >> let me go back to the arab spring. what do you think the lessons are? >> the lesson of the arab spring is that authoritarianism is not stable. it's simply not stable. if men, women and children don't

have a way to change their circumstances and change their government peacefully, they will do it violently. when we were in romania, we learned of something that i've now called the -- [inaudible] moment. the dictator of romania in 1989 with revolutions going on in poland, hungary and czechoslovakia, he went into a square in bucharest, and he was exhorting the rumanian people, and all of a sudden one old lady yells, "liar." then ten people, then a hundred, then 100,000 people are yelling, "liar." and all of a sudden he realizes he'd better get out of there. and instead of delivering him to freedom, the young military officer delivers him to the revolution, and he and his wife are executed. that moment is when fear breaks down. either an old lady yells "liar," or a soldier turns his gun away

from the crowd, refuses to fire, or a tank turret is turned away from the crowd. and then all that's left between the dictator and his people is anger, and that's what you've got in the arab spring now. and that's why authoritarianism is not stable. >> what about, what do you think about leading from behind as these multilateral coalitions and -- >> i don't mind multilateral coalitions. i'm sorry, leading from behind is an oxymoron. it is. you don't lead from behind. [applause] and i actually think as some in the white house may be sorry that they used that phrase. >> uh-huh. let me ask you about a domestic issue because i actually, um, share your view and had conversations with president bush about the failure of immigration reform. and how, how serious do you think that issue is for the next presidential debate that we have? >> it is essential.

and let me tell you why. when you're secretary of state, you get to go out in the world, you get to see what people admire about the united states. there are a lot of things that are not admired, but the one thing that's overwhelmingly admired is our great national myth, you can come from humble circumstances, it doesn't matter where you came from, it matters where you're going. and that's actually led people to come here for generations from around the world to be a part of that. and it's why we have asian-americans and mexican-americans, and we have german-americans and indian-americans. it's because people, the most ambitious people have wanted to be a part of that. now, i don't know when immigrants became the enemy, but if we don't fix this, we are going to undo one of the greatest strengths of the united states. because the only thing that keeps us from the sclerotic demographics of europe and japan is immigration. and so i am a major proponent of

come prehence i immigration -- comprehensive immigration reform that, first and foremost -- [applause] that, first and foremost, recognizes we have people living in the shadows, and we have got to deal with that. we're not a country that actually wants people to be afraid to go and take their sick child to a hospital. that's not the kind of country we are. and i worry that the states because the federal government has not acted are starting a patchwork now of immigration policies when really what we need is a federal policy that is true to ourselves, true to our laws but, also, true to the absolute fact that the united states of america is well served by the great me melange of people that we are. >> i have three quick questions

to wind -- [applause] wind this up. next fall, let's pretend, you've been invited to be, um, the moderator of a presidential debate. the debate's theme is foreign policy. what's the first question you will ask both candidates? >> do you believe that america has an exceptional and unique role to play in the world? or is america just some, any other country? because if america's just any other country, then you have no right to ask the american people to sustain the sacrifices that we have and to play the role that we have on behalf of the international community for now better than 60 years. and so why is america exceptional? [applause] >> wonderful question. second question is, even though

you're not responsible and they can't officially wake you up anymore -- [laughter] what keeps you up at night in foreign policy? what are the things that you worry about that we ought to worry about? >> well, i worry about, you know, the list of terribles; iran, pakistan. i worry about mexico. i think that we don't pay enough attention to what's happening on our southern border, and if you live in california or new mexico, you know that the drug cartels own a lot of that space between northern mexico and the southern border of the united states, and it's very dangerous. last year, um, there were -- two years ago there were 5,000 kidnappings and murders of officials, mexican officials. probably twice that in the last couple of years. so very dangerous. but do you know what mostly keeps me up at night? it's the question of whether the united states is going to reaffirm and somehow do the internal repair that we need to

do to lead. i worry that we can't seem to get our entitlements under control. i worry that we can't get our budget deficits under control. i worry about immigration policy. i worry about the fact that in k-12 education i can look at your zip code and tell whether or not you're going to get a good education. and that's not just wrong, it is actually probably going to undo us more quickly than anything the chinese could ever do to us. because if we have people who are unemployable -- and they will be unemployable -- they'll have to live on the dole because they'll have no other choice, we will continue to have a situation in which only 30% of the people who take the basic skills test to get into the military can pass it. it will, indeed, pull us apart as a country faster than anything else. and if we're not confident and optimistic in one country, we won't lead. and so that's probably the one that really keeps me up at night. >> um, here's my final question.

if you have a choice between running for the senate in california -- [laughter] being a university president or being head of the national football league -- [laughter] what's your first choice? >> oh, that's no contest. [laughter] well, i used to want to be the commissioner of the nfl, but i told roger goodell, you know, when i was struggling with the russians and iranians every day, your job looked good, but actually from northern california, it doesn't look so good anymore. [laughter] and these days. and i have to say it, these days being a university professor at stanford university where the stanford cardinal are having quite a special season -- you know, come on. you know what those special seasons are like. you've had plenty of them. let us have one. that's really the greatest job in the world. >> ah, thank you, madam secretary. [applause]

that was fun. >> that was great. [applause] >> for more information about condoleezza rice, visit hoover.org and search her name. >> recently, the new york times released their top ten best books of 2011. here are the five nonfiction titles. christopher hitchens's cay collection, "arguably," ranges to afghanistan and politics. "the boy in the moon" by ian brown recounts the story of his son who was born with a genetic mutation. "malcolm x" has been discussed on booktv, and you can watch those programs online at booktv.org. psychologist "daniel conman

takes a look at "thinking fast and slow." and "in a world on fire," amanda foreman writes about which side great britain would have supported during the war. go to nytimes.com and click on arts for a complete list. >> here's a short author interview from c-span's campaign 2012 bus as it travels the country. >> dr. leonard, you've written several books on topics during the civil war. what interested you in this topic? >> well, my interest in the civil war is somewhat mysterious to me. if you had told me many years ago when i was a girl that this was what i was going to study, i would have said -- i grew up in the vietnam era, i hate war, i hate guns, you know, i don't like any of this -- i don't like this topic at all.

but when i was a graduate student in american history, i happened to take a class on the civil war, and something about it just clicked with me. in that class i particularly decided that the complete absence of women's, comments on women in the class, women didn't seem to have had anything to do with the civil war in that class, and i determined that that would be my life's work, that i would write about women in the civil war. but, of course, i've branched out since then, but that is where i started. >> who is joseph holt? >> joseph holt was lincoln's judge advocate general. and if people remember him today, they particularly remember him as the judge advocate general who was after lincoln's assassination responsible for prosecuting the conspirators who had worked with john wilkes booth. however, he is a much larger figure than that. he had a very -- he was 50-some years old by the time he got to washington, and by the time he became lincoln's judge advocate

general. he had a very long life, and he lived on until 1894, so he's a much bigger figure than that. but the way we know him best is for his years as lincoln's judge advocate general. >> you titled this "lincoln's forgotten ally." why did you choose this as a title? >> because of his importance to lincoln, because of his deep devotion to lincoln and his policies and, therefore, he is lincoln's ally. but he is someone whom we simply don't remember in the historical record except in terms of a tiny slice of what role he played over the course of his life. as a professional. so he was, to me, one of the most important members of lincoln's administration, and yet he has dropped off the historical map except for certain tiny parts of his life. and that's what i find among the most fascinating things about him. >> why do you feel holt was so overlooked in history? >> one of the reasons i think he

was overlooked is because we like our historical figures to be very simple and easy to understand, and he is an immensely complicated person to understand. so he takes a lot of work to think about, and i think that's one reason. he also was involved in ways at the end of the civil war, with complicated issues and took stances that a lot of people feel were vindictive and hateful towards the south when really the nation should just be peaceably reconciled and so on. so i think he's been not just forgotten, but also dismissed. another thing i'd say is that he was a cayenne, he was a southern slave holder, and because kentucky remained a union state throughout the war, but after the war it was sort of a postwar confederate state, because of his strong union stance, kentucky itself had no reason to remember him.

and one of the most fascinating experiences of doing research on him was to go to kentucky a couple of years ago and ask people if they'd ever heard of him. and the number who had heard of him could be counted on, you know, one hand, maybe two. so that's, there are many reasons why he's been forgotten. >> you just touched on it briefly, and you state in your book that popular opinion of holt is misrepresented by americans' collective historical memory, so explain what you mean by this and how does the portrayal of him differ from that in your book? >> i think that the way he's remembered is misrepresented because when he is remembered at all, first of all, he's mostly not remembered, and he's a very important figure for, you know, through the civil war era right up to 1894. so he's forgotten. that's a misrepresentation. he's also, when he is remembered, remembered as this purely vindictive figure who simply wanted to punish the south and as the film the

conspirators suggests, the whole character is, obviously, out to get the one woman who was involved in the lincoln assassination conspiracy. he's out to get her, he has no scruples, he's completely amoral and so on. so this image is also a misrepresentation. it treats him as if he was simply a corrupt judge, and he wasn't. what i've tried to do in this book is, first of all, break him out of the darkness, right? so it's a different representation because it is a representation, and it's a big representation. it's a very long, full biography of an entire life. it also tries to put the things that people do remember about him and the ways they see him in a larger context of the work that he did, what he believed, why he believed what he believed and why he made the choices that he made as a professional and as lincoln's judge advocate general. >> what was holt's role in lincoln's administration? >> as judge advocate general, he was, basically, the overseer of all military justice, so h