hear nothing that we have not heard before. >> as candidates campaign for president this year, we look back at 14 men who ran for the office and lost. go to our web site, c-span.org/the contenders, to see video of the contenders who had a lasting impact on american politics. >> so let us our opponents stand on the status quo while we seek to refresh the american spirit. [applause] let the opposition collect their $10 million in secret money from the privileged few, and let us find one million ordinary americans who will contribute $25 each to this campaign, a million-member club with members who will not expect special favors for themselves, but a better land for us all. [applause] ..

>> good evening, everyone. i am the community relations manage her for barns and noble of georgetown and i welcome to you this evening's special event. madeleine albright was nominated by president clinton on december 5, 1996 as secretary of state. after being unanimously confirmed by the united states senate, he was sworn in as the 64th secretary of state on

january 23, 1997. this historical apointment made madeleine albright the first female to serve as secretary of state. [applause] we are pleased to welcome secretary albright for her second visit to barnes and noble of georgetown as she discusses the new paperback release of her best selling book qud matt dam secretary" it's an intriguing look at her years in political service as well as a highly personal expose. raising three daughters, the highs and lows of marriage and a discovery of her roots under the media spotlight. it is my sincere pleasure to introduce madeleine albright. [applause]

>> thank you very much. thank you all for coming. i'm really delighted to see so many people here. thank you. and i'm very pleased to have a chance to talk to you about my book and the new paperback part which has a new epilogue to it. a lot of people asked me why i wanted to write a book, and i had a number of reasons for it. i loved being secretary of state and i considered it the highest honor and i thought that going along with the honor was also an obligation to write about the events that had taken place, because the only way that history is really written is by those who in some form or another have participated in it, and we all have our own versions of it. and it's up to the reader, i think, to compare the different versions and figure out what really did happen. i had access to all my papers that i worked on when i was both at the united nations and

secretary of state. so it's based on an official record. and so the main reason obviously is to write down the events that took place in the eight years of the clinton administration. but i also wanted to write my own story, so this is not exactly like other secretaries of state memoirs. and i think i have a pretty good story. i was not born in this country. i came here at age 11 in 1948, making me almost 68 in a month or so. and i came from a very interesting family. my father was a czech diplomat who started his diplomatic service in the free country of czechoslovakia in the 1930's, having been a product of that country and its creation as a democratic republic. so i write something about czechoslovakia, but i also

write about our experiences during world war ii, which we spent in england and then escaping to the united states to escape communism in 1948. so it tells a story of central and eastern europe in a little bit in the war periods and then my immigrant story continues of having moved to denver, colorado, where my father was dean of a graduate school at the university of denver. and what it was like for me trying to blend in and be a bonified american teenager, which i was desperate to be, but i had these uptight european parents and my father did in fact think that it would be a good idea to fit in. so he took up fishing, which was a colorado thing. but he went fishing in a coat and tie. [laughter] and my mother was this adorable nut who, in fact, entertained a lot of people at our parties by

reading their palms. and she regularly told women in their 50's and in the 1950's, that they were going to have children, and to the men their husbands sitting next to them they were going to have affairs. and somehow she got away with it. so this is what i grew up in. so i was thrilled to get away from it all and go to wellsly. and then i got married three days after i graduated from college. and this little immigrant girl became mrs. patterson albright. i married into a very interesting family and had twin daughters two years later. so the immigrant story changes to a woman's story. so i tell that, the ups and downs and the zigs and zags of my career. i didn't have a full-time government job until i was 39 years old when i went to work for ed musky. so i tell that story and i tell

the story of working in the carter administration and it comes to the third reason that i really wanted to write. and that is to talk about the role of the united states that i feel very, very strongly about. and i do believe that we're an exceptional country and it is something that is very clear in my own life and the kind of theme through the book is that i wanted to show that when the united states acts, i used to believe good things happen. that -- and for me, the very seminal event was munich. munich happened a year after i was born, so i didn't know much about it, except it was the only thing that was central to conversations my father had saying what happened, that the british, the french, the italians signed an agreement with germany over the heads of

czechoslovakia, and czechoslovakia was dismembered and the united states was not involved. when u.s. got involved in the second world war, the tide turned and we won the war. but as a result of agreements during the war, there were -- it was agreed that central and yearn europe would be "liberated by the red army" and the iron curtain came down and come nism took over central and eastern europe and the u.s. was not involved. without going through the whole theme, i do fully believe that an engaged america is very important. and i believe that as i took up my jobs at the u.n. and as a secretary of state and i did say over and over again that the united states was an indispenseable nation and i believe it. i was in enough meetings to know if we were not a catalyst, not a lot happened. but indispenseable to me never

meant alone and never meant we were you ubiquitous. but because we are rich and powerful, that we have an obligation to deal with the axis of evil of poverty and disease and health issues and globalization and economic issues. those are the axis of evil. so i'm very troubled by a lot of the things that are happening in the united states now, and that is a lot of what i write about in the epilogue. concerned about the events in iraq, concerned about our lack of activity on getting hold of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. concerned about our lack of interest in anything but military activities. and concerned generally because i go to so many international meetings about what has happened to the reputation of the united states. a country that i was so proud of and when i got to sit behind

the sign called "united states," nothing made me prouder. and the fourth reason i wanted to write the book was just to entertain people. and i think i have. i've been very pleased with the reaction to the book. one of my first meetings when i went -- when the hardback came out, i was delighted to see people come and want to hear about the book and i wanted the mood to be just right as i talked about it. and it was one of those events where there were a number of authors. and i look up and i see that the author ahead of me had written a book called "ready to pee," a comprehensive manual on the art of potty training. so what is the segue here? how am i going to deal with this? so i figured it out and i said that there were great similarities to managing foreign policy to training

2-year-olds. the only difference being the consequences of the mistakes that inevitably happen. so i'm delighted to see you here. i would be very, very pleased to answer whatever questions you have. and one of the best parts about no longer being secretary of state is i can actually answer your questions. so everything is open season and i would be very pleased. thank you so very much. [applause] >> if you could just raise your hands, we'll get a mike to you. >> before we kick off the question and answer period, i would like to ask you if you would talk about your meeting with pope john paul? >> i would be very interested in doing that. i actually had the honor of being in the holy father's presence four times. and the first time was just after he had been made pope and he came to the united states.

and i have to tell you, when he was named pope, as you know, i worked on the national security council for -- and president carter was at camp david at the time that the nomination was made. so he called the president to tell him he had met karol wojtyla, the arch bishop of cack cow and he had been named pope. and president carter has this wonderful quality of being exuberant and exaggerating people's relationships and he got off the helicopter and he came down and the press asked him about how he felt about it and he said, it's just wonderful, the new pope is a very close, personal friend of dr. brajinski and he was slightly embarrassed by that. then he was invited to the

white house and it really was a sensational event and i will never forget, it was a gorgeous, gorgeous day and he had on his white robes and the wind caught the back of it and it's kind of a cape and it came up. so it looked like he had a halo, and it was really kind of the beginning of my thoughts about him as a really holy man. i saw him when he came to the's coast another time when he went to san francisco to sell brate the -- celebrate the founding of the united nations. and my last meeting with him was in 1998 and it came about as a result of the fact that the pope had been to cuba and we were very interested in what was happening in cuba. i had spent my academic life as somebody who studied change in communist systems. and i knew about the incredible

role that the pope had played in changing poland and it was very interesting, specifically because he went to poland in 1979 and the regime had agreed to the visit, but they had decided they would have nothing to do with planning it. and so what they did was turn over all the logistical planning and everything that had to be done to the local perishes. from the regimes perspective, it turned out to be a huge mistake. what it shows was the independent power that the various parishes had and how much they should if they got their act together. and then what happened was -- and you've seen pictures of this now, these huge crowds they had in cra cow as well as in warsaw, the biggest crowds they had ever seen. one of the things we knew about communno carrier

he might have the same effect their and we were waiting very much to see what would happen but it didn't happen because the role of the church in cuba is different than the role it plays in poland and the pope is not cubin comegys polish, and so he did not have that same affect, but he continued to be very interested in what was going on in cuba and objected highly to the embargo which he told me that then we talked about what could be done in cuba, and at

that time he was truly remarkable. i came in and i spoke polish and then said but i thought you were czech. but he really did exude this goodness and my cousins and i said to him please, pray for me and then as we were leaving he was holding my hand and said i will do as you wish and the press wondered what it was i had asked. [laughter] and i didn't at that time say that all i had asked which is very important is that he prayed for me. so i was very, very honored to see him. [laughter] >> all right. let's start taking questions. who's got the first one? >> very green. >> it's not even st. patrick's day. >> thank you for being here.

[inaudible] my question is you mentioned in your book your greatest regret wasn't getting a hold of the situation quickly enough and my question is on darfur and the current situation and what do you think, do you think the united states would have on the polling going on in sudan? and also what can and should be done and what direction do you believe? >> you are absolutely right and i make quite clear how depressed i was about the fact that we were not able to act, president clinton has apologized. i have. i went over the record very carefully in writing the book and i think in retrospect that even there it would have been very hard to get a significant number of troops into rwanda rapidly enough to end the genocide because the genocide was like a volcanic explosion.

but i find it more than ironic that ten years after when we have seen movies like hotel rwanda or there's been endless articles criticizing what we did and all of a sudden we have rolling genocide in front of us, not volcanic and we've not been able to get our act together. i am somewhat hopeful by the events of the last few days in the security council where in fact three separate resolutions were passed which would make it possible first of all to support a peacekeeping operation there although that peacekeeping operations the five major mandate is to deal with the peace agreement that is made between north and south, not specifically darfur but at least i think it is shown some movement. it also has managed to impose sanctions or the threat more of

sanctions on sudan, and the most interesting of all which makes me think that there is a learning curve in the bush administration and that is that rather than arguing about the venue of the international criminal court we abstained on that vote and made it possible for the crimes against humanity to be submitted to the court. the question though is not dissimilar from what we faced in rwanda. who will send the troops, and the african unef policy certain number of trips. we have not exactly committed numbers of troops and the whole question is who will sit in the troops. i may go on a minute about this because i teach a course at the university georgetown called the national security toolbox and we have looked at a whole host of ways that policy has carried out. and yesterday i was lecturing on the role of peacekeeping, and

with the role of it is and what the united states supported oming and you would think thatg the u.n. was out there marauding all over the place and that the u.s. was a major contributor to the troops in peacekeeping ari operations. there are a maximum 400 americans serving in about 17 peacekeeping operations which numbers somewhere between 50 to 60,000 most of the americans serving are not troops, they are civilian advisers, so i do think that if we are going to make ao big, and legitimately a big set of criticisms about what didn't oappen in rwanda that we have af obligation to do something about darfur. estimate your book inspired me e

lot and i have a question you express your consent about the keen interest in the political administration and i think that your sense could be quite different from the current administration regarding north korea's nuclear nonproliferation activity if you have a comment. >> well, let me say this, thatin when we were in office, we felty the situation in north korea was extremely dangerous. '94, whenirst in '93, they pulled out of thewere ry non-proliferation treaty, and we were very worried. to us i think that we can as close to using a military option asto anywhere at a time thoughre ut the tiations were going on to try to figure out how to get the north back into the npt and howi

agreed into the negotiating mode with them and that is when the framework was signed and fort tn very briefly the north koreans y maintained the needed nucleare t energy because they didn't have sufficient other energy, and thn agreement was that south korea, japan and the united states wer ould provide money for buildin the light water reactors in f exchange for which the north koreans would freeze their nuclear program. and they were doing that and while i hold no brief at all for kim jong il, the three countries that promised to build the were nuclear reactors were slow t because in fact parliaments of all the centuries including the congress for having a hard time coming up with the money for thn and meanwhile we were delivering heavy fuel to the north koreans

to try to delete g8 giving food through the world food program. and then we -- the situation deteriorated in august, 1998 when the north koreans launched a missile over japan. and so we thought that this was the most dangerous situation that we had encountered, that the status quo was unacceptable, and as a result of a whole policy review, former defense secretary perry went to north korea, talked to them and offered them kind of a fork in the road. that they could negotiate to get rid of their missiles, keep their programs frozen in exchange for working towards normalizing a relationship with the united states. what the north koreans are most interested in is normalizing relations with the u.s. now, i had the rather dubious honor of -- i still have it, i guess, of being the highest level american official to meet

with kim chung il. we had very little information about him. the c.i.a. had basically told us he was crazy and -- but what was interesting is kim dy jung, the president of south korea met with him and said it was perfectly possible to have a rational conversation with him and that it was worth having a discussion. they sent over a high-level person to invite president clinton and president clinton said we don't -- i just don't go places, it has to be prepared, which is why i went. going to pyun yang was a real experience. it's a very beautiful city in some parts but you know very well that the rest of the country, the people are starving. i had a very early press conference with kim chung il and we're stand thing at the press conference and i look over and i see we're about the same height.

and then i know that i have on high heels and then i saw that he did, too. [laughter] and his hair was a great deal more bufant than mine. but we did have 12 hours of talks of various kinds, some just over a table and some at dinners, and some at this completely crazy event he took me to, which was a redoing of their celebration of the 50th anniversary of the workers party. and so we talked a lot and we were in the middle of negotiations when the election happened and there are a lot of americans that were confused about the election of 2000. believe me, that i can understand why kim chung il might have been confused about the american position. because all negotiations stopped and that is where we are now. in the meantime, he has

unfrozen his nuclear program as far as we know. we are being told that he's reprocessed a lot of the fuel rods and we are told that he cheated. yes, he did cheat. but i maintain the following things -- you make arms control agreements with your enemies, not with your friends. and all through the cold war, we did have arms control agreements with the soviet union. we thought they cheated. they thought we cheated. there was a way -- there was a process whereby you tried to sort out what had happened. so by negotiating arms control agreements with the north koreans, i think we would have had a process, a way of trying to sort out what they were really doing. but i think it's very dangerous. i think it's the most dangerous situation that we face, because we invaded a country because we thought it had nuclear weapons. we know that north korea has nuclear weapons and i think that if i were kim chung il, i

would read the message the following way -- if you don't have nuclear weapons, you get invaded. if you do have nuclear weapons, you don't get invaded because we did not invade the soviet union or china. and i believe that it wouldn't hurt us to have bilateral talks with north korea within the context of the six-party talks because we can't afford to be in the position that they are taking the time of building up their nuclear potential while we are standing on principle that we won't talk to them. because i believe it's truly dangerous. >> condoleezza rice on her trip to europe seems to have charmed europe and i wonder if you have any comment on how she's doing and any advice you might give her? >> i have to tell you about my connection with condoleezza rice and if you read the book, you'll read this again. my father died in 1977 and i

was at home and there were lots of tributes and flowers and all kinds of things. when there was a ceramic container in the shape of a piano with leaves and i asked my mother where did this come from, and she said it's from your father's favorite student, condoleezza rice. she had gone to the university of denver as a music major but had to take international relations for distribution or something. and ended up having my father as a professor. he persuaded her to become an international may nor. she returned to denver and was working on a p.h.d. on the czech military. so i thought we might have something in common. so in 1987, when i was working for my long stream of losing democratic presidential

candidates -- [laughter] i was working for michael dukakis as his foreign policy advisor whose role it was to bring other advisors in. so i thought perfect. here she was, a soviet expert, taught at stanford, a woman, african-american, a perfect advisor. so i called her up and she said madame, i don't know how to tell you this, but i'm a republican. and i said, condy, how could you be, we have the same father. [laughter] so we occasionally have discussions and she'll say, well your father would like this, and i would say no. and i say that i actually channel with him better now than she does. i do think she charmed people on her trip and i've also made the following sexist conclusion, that it's easier for women to make up than men, not just makeup, but make up.

and that she wanted to be charming and forthcoming. i have great admiration for colin powell, but he didn't travel. and so she really i think did a very good job. i've talked a lot of europeans who also were charmed by her. and thought that it was very evident that she liked what she was doing. i have decided that i would reserve comment about the policies for another month or so, if i can stand it. because i think that people should be given a chance to see what they can do. she has a lot on her plate. and there are such opportunities and challenges. i think the middle east is the biggest one out there. the fact that yasser arafat is no locker -- longer opens up

the doors for all kinds of things in the middle east peace. iraq is not exactly going the way it should. and i think there are whole issues about our relationships with the europeans, the north korean issue is out there. our relationship with the russians is deteriorating. and that is not to speak about issues of poverty and hunger and disease. and so i think there's a lot for her to do. i must say that i sympathize with her over the fact that people talk about what she's wearing. i find that really appalling. they do not talk about what male secretaries of state wear. and i think she looks great. [applause] >> just briefly i will say that i and most dutch do -- [inaudible] it wasn't until

recently that i learned that your country years ago -- [inaudible] do you think that would have made a difference? >> if americans spoke dutch? >> yeah. >> i'm sure it would have. laugh it's an interesting concept, because the truth is that americans are very much a part of the anglo saxon world, or have been. what is changing about america is that it's less and less anglo saxon. but obviously there were very close roots with the

netherlands or holland because it was called new amsterdam. i have to tell you, i've heard dutch. it's much harder than english. and so i don't know whether americans who are kind of monolingual could have ever handled anything that was that complicated. >> good evening, madame secretary. nice to see you again. i have a question, in terms of the death of the prime minister in lebanon, are we yet to know which country was involved in his death or do we have any idea? and what do you see happening in terms of syria? will they come back as they have in the past and what do you see happening there? >> well, i do think that his assassination is a major tragedy. he was a remarkable person.

i had seen him just a couple months ago at a conference in dubai, and he had all kinds of fascinating plans in terms of reconstruction for lebanon. a lot of the reconstruction that had taken place in beirut had been done under his egis. and one of the reasons he had resigned as prime minister was that he was concerned about the overwhelming influence of syria in terms of extending the term of the president and then a prime minister that was truly pro-syrian took his place. and what he was trying to do was to work for the independence of lebanon away from the syrians. so his assassination was obviously very deliberate. we do not know who did it. there are investigations going on, there are a lot of guessing about it. there are a lot of people who believe that there was -- there would have been no way for an assassination that was this

well carried out to have been done without some authorities knowing about it. but i'm not willing to point the finger because we truly do not know. i think -- at least i don't. but i do think that this has really pressed the syrians into thinking -- into rethinking their policy. now, it is not fully carried out. they have said that they would get their troops out of lebanon. they have said that they're pulling some of their intelligence people out of lebanon. but the prime minister who was named as very pro-syrian said he was going to resign. now he's decided to stay on, at least as of this morning. and so there is a question as to how the tentacles and the control will go on. it is from a syrian perspective, it is a mixed bag in terms of whether -- if they're overextended in a country it hurts them.

if they have to withdrawal totally under pressure, that hurts the position of their leadership. i think people are pretty confused about what's actually going on in syria, whether some of the old -- or the gang that was around is running it. but syria is of concern to the united states and of concern to the region. the role of the hezbollah is of tremendous concern in the region, and so i think it's very unstable. the question that i have are whether the same kind of thoughts about democracy in lebanon and jordan and in iraq and various places, whether we're seeing the same kind of desire for democracy or whether , according to some of the reading i've done in lebanon it is a desire to be independent, and that while there were revolutions -- crowds in the

streets, each of these crowds are somewhat different. so it's very fluid at the moment. i don't think we know enough about it. i do think that the united states should be in a position of saying something that we said all along without a good chance of making it happen is that lebanon needed to be independent and that people needed to make decisions about who should run them. but it is a very, very complicated country. if people think that iraq is complicated, the sectarian issues in lebanon are also very complicated and they had a civil war and the question is how the christians and the muslims and all the various parts will get along. >> thank you for coming. i have a more personal question for you about six months before you -- [inaudible] and i was wondering could you talk more about that -- [inaudible]

>> you know, it is -- it's very interesting, because i had even before all this, from even the brief synopsis that i gave you, a fairly complicated life, and a fairly rich background. and i detail quite fully about how i found out about this. so i think there were two very difficult chapters in my book. one was about my divorce, and one was about this. not for finding out that i was jewish, because i thought that was very interesting in knowing about a jewish background and the richness of jewish tradition and the bravery of jewish people. but what was terrible was finding out that three out of my grandparents had died in the holocaust. and finding out more about the circumstances of it and finding out in a way that was devastating on a day that i

thought would be the happiest day of my life, which was the day that the president had the state of the union message, and it was the first time in american history that a woman would lead the cabinet into the house chamber. and the headlines of that morning had basically made it sound as if i were a complete criminal and had lied about my background, which i hadn't. so there was this whole mixture of feelings about feeling desperately awful about my parents and my grandparents and very proud of being secretary of state and i tried to describe that as honestly as i possibly can. i went to prague as soon as i could and went to a place called the pinka synagogue, which maybe some have visited. and they have all the names of the people that died, the czech jews that had died, and i had

-- when i had been to prague previously, the synagogue was under construction. so i did not go in until the summer before that when i went with hillary clinton and i had no reason to look at the wall. but when i went there and they had pointed out where the names were, i was overwhelmed with terrible sadness, primarily for my parents. i didn't really know my grandparents. and i also with gratitude to my parents for taking me away. because if they hadn't, their names would have been the wall and my name would have been on the wall and my brother and sister wouldn't have existed. so i went through a lot of very different feelings. i've been asked how this did affect my life, and i try to answer that as honestly as i can. i was raised -- i certainly knew about the holocaust, i just didn't know that it affected me personally. and so in the way that i had

learned history and what i knew, i knew that we could never allow it to happen again, which is why i worked so hard on bosnia and i tried on ruwanda and i did on kosovo. but i didn't -- so in many ways it didn't change my way of thinking because i knew the difference between right and wrong and about the evil that had been perpetrated. and i had grown up to be very tolerant and so it didn't particularly affect me. i grew up a christian and so to tell you honestly i'm confused. and i have written in the book that here i am, in my middle, late 60's, in a kind of a strange feeling. and i was asked about the pope. and having been raised a catholic, i can identify with all of that, and so i'm trying to figure it out. my youngest daughter married a jewish man and i can tell you

one set of inlaws that were thrilled when all this came out. [laughter] and i have a grandson who i went last week i was out visiting them in san francisco and i wept to the temple school he goes to and he runs around the house yelling shabot shaloam. but i'm very happy to have all the richness in my life. so thank you. >> thank you for coming here tonight. [inaudible] my question is, when in office -- [inaudible] i had the opportunity to listen to clinton's speech this past yule and -- this past july, and he expressed frustration with

the fact there wasn't much follow up in what we had done. with recent happenings with arafat and what is your feeling that the current administration -- [inaudible] >> i always agree with president clinton, so -- but let me say this, is that we spent an incredible amount of time on the middle east, and president clinton himself worked on the issue in truly the most remarkable way. i try to describe this in terms of the amount of detail that he knew, the way that he played the negotiator at the y talks between the israelis and palestinians and how hard he worked at camp david, and we came very, very close. i think that what became

evident to me was that yasser arafat, really, was incapable of making the decisions that he had to make. i am not a shrink, but i think that he had a very hard time moving from being in his own mind a freedom fighter to actually being a president. yet there were people around him that i think wanted to come to some kind of an agreement. one of the saddest parts -- well, one of the hardest parts, i think, and sad, of leaving a job that you love which both president clinton and i did is watching things that you worked on very hard unravel. obviously, a different administration of a different party has a whole different set of agendas and initiatives added to the fact that, it may sound paranoid, but we kind of had the feeling that the first years of the bush administration the policy was a.b.c., anything but clinton, which meant that like the north

korean issue, people didn't pay attention to it. we were interested in the balkans. that was not what they were interested in. and the middle east peace which they were not interested in, and on the contrary, there was no follow-up on it. and so i think that four years were lost. and i have my own views about whether it was smart to isolate arafat. i happen to think that he regained stature of being a victim and a martyr rather than being somebody that even my own sense was the palestinian negotiators were feeling was not doing anything, that they were concerned about the fact that he wasn't proactive. so i think time has been lost, and a lot of people have died. and i hope very, very much that this is a time that the administration will get more

involved, that the gaza withdrawal is a big opportunity, but it can't be the last. and it will require a very active american presence, and i do think that i believe in a bipartisan foreign policy. i said to myself over and over again when i was secretary, and i said it publicly, that i had all my partisan instincts surgically removed. they have clearly grown back. but i -- i do think that the only kind of policy is one in which there is some continuity from administration to administration. because while we don't speak dutch, we are confusing enough to people in terms of these switches, and this is the united states, and there should be some consistency to what we are doing, and one administration should try to pick up what the other administration has left. four years -- or eight years is

actually a very short time and you can't afford to just drop issues, and the middle east, i think, is one of the biggest ones, so i agree with president clinton. >> you have the last question. >> my name is yosha eger from germany. talked after the last meetings between bush and chancellor schroeder, but what do you think about the future of the relationship between the united states and germany after the trouble of the last years? >> you don't want to know why we don't speak german. ok. i think that -- you know, what is very interesting to me, as i said, i was from czechoslovakia, not inclined to be someone that was very pro german, but i had learned in my time both as a grown-up and also when i served in the

carter administration and then my time at the u.n. and as secretary, that the relationship with germany is a very, very important one, and i must say that the relationship that i had with sexroshka fischer, the foreign -- -- the foreign minister was incredibly useful in dealing with issues in the balkans, but also in the middle east or discussions about russia or cooperation on issues in africa, and so i was very, very much in favor of a strong u.s.-german relationship and i was very troubled by the falling apart as a result of iraq. i must say, i don't think chancellor schroeder handled things very well in terms of the way he stated his preferences, and i don't think that president bush responded very well. personal pique is not a foreign policy. and so i think that it's

important for there to be a mending of the relationship, because it's crucial to the stability both of the united states and europe, and it's part of a larger issue which is about the importance of u.s.-european relations and i know there are endless meetings and conferences about where are the relationships going, and is europe from venus and america from mars and will we ever be able to figure out, so i try to remind audiences that venus and mars actually got along pretty well. they had a number of children together. one of them was concordia, the goddess of harmony, so perhaps there is a way to make it up, because we really do need each other, and we can't be angry. and as i said, kind of personal affronts is not something that makes those work. thank you all very much for coming. thank you. thanks for your good questions.

thank you. the university is currently cataloguing the collection at the fenwick library. booknotes, an hourlong interview program hosted by brian lamb hosted from 1989 to 2004. the gm you university library and shows us the collection

entitled beyond the book. >> in the mind of bryan, this book is the genesis of all of the booknotes programs for of c-span. by reading this book he decided he wanted to interview the author and that gave him the idea that of booknotes that would be worthwhile for him to read a lot of books and talk to the authors. >> 101 episodes of booknotes all are original and this was the first official, correct? is a new brzezinski. speed exactly. signy brzezinski was the first chair of the security council for the carter administration. >> john zenelis, when you pick the books to go in these cases,

to carry did this by the way? >> several of my colleagues in the special collections and archives area, they made the selection for the books to be highlighted and they may but annotations accompanying each of the display items and they chose to select a question on the booknotes televised program by a brian lamb and then produced the answer by the author and a question to the estimate in the ben franklin but you can see a lot of notes taken while reading the book. when you put these books in the cases did you look for varying points of view as c-span dozen general? >> yes, exactly so. as i mentioned, one of the criteria was to reflect the

broad perspective involved in booknotes and that is exactly the point. there are various subjects covered in the 801 box, and second, many points of view from the political perspective, a social perspective, humanistic perspective, all kinds of perspectives. >> is this archive available for scholars or for the public? >> it is beginning to become available. the library staff or in the process of cataloguing the collection. we are about 40% through at this point for the titles that have already been catalogued, yes, they are available to any student faculty member here at the university, and of course this information is accessible through the world wide web in

the united states and abroad. -- and you will you be putting it on the web site at some point? >> yes. >> john zenelis we have seen some of the books on display but you've also got posters throughout the library, and i want to start with this one right here. this is from the booknotes interview boundaries was her book. what are we looking at here? >> we are looking into pieces of paper. one is a page from a writing pad that has brian lamb's notes about the book and then we have an envelope from a bill that looks like from verizon where he has made additional notes including some personal liberation in naples florida i understand coming in by understand henry was the first

person that employed him professionally in a professional capacity. so it shows that he maintained relationships throughout his life with his early mentors. >> let's continue. let's look at the full collection if we could come and again we've got posters throughout three >> the purpose of the poster is to connect this part of the exhibit to the other part of the exhibit which is the first defeat of third building of the complex the constitutes. >> can the public come through and see these books? >> most definitely. in an the other part of the exhibit, which is outside of our special collections and archive syria here we have three display cases containing the materials

from the book collection. in this particular case it is not just the books, but we also have what we consider an archive part of the collection which is relating to the book and it is john kuhl train music. >> mr. zenelis to all of these books have notes such as this one that we see here? >> it varies. i understand from brian and originally he was not making any patience with in the books themselves. he was making notes separately.

he has retained some of those notes but not all of them. later on as the program progressed, he started making notes in the books themselves. >> now, in the long-term welfare eink fatta being open as it is now? to the air and the light? >> well, all physical materials over time deutsch. , however we in the libraries in the special collections and archives, we have special environmental conditions to preserve paper and anything that is written on paper, so under proper care, this writing should last for centuries. this particular book can only be used on site in the reading room

of the special collections archives to which we will be going leader. however, we have older copies available in the general collection of the libraries that are available for circulation. >> more notes from one of the books. why did this one get blown up? what was special about this one? >> we understand that it is one of the favored it authors of brian, and as you can see from this poster, he really became interested in this particular book, and that's why we chose it because of all of the significance to the author. >> we have a letter to brian from devotee. >> i recommend the book be

considered for booknotes and i should point out that the the late professor was a professor here at george mason university, and in fact in this case contains another book by a mason professor which is say cheese which is a fiction book to be highlighted in the booknotes program. >> here are the rest of the 801 books, correct? >> exactly. and these books are in the order that they were in brian lamb's office in c-span, and also they are in the order of the televised programs. >> so, beginning here except for the ones taken out and you have