right back to the beginning of the country which suggests that i have lived one third of the history of america. that suggests that i have probably also lived roughly one third of the conservative intellectual tradition in america. now, that either means that we have a very young country or i am very old. or both. as mallory said i spent four years writing my memoir, and part of that time was taking a large 80-year long archive and digitizing a good portion of it, and we established a website to support the book, and therefore if you go into the book and read a paragraph, you can actually go to the end note and pull up the entire memo that paragraph came

out of, and i am told it is probably the first political memoir of the information age. back in the old days you couldn't do all that. it just wasn't possible. today it is. you have had some very fine talent conservatives here, al, michael ma roen, ed neasee doug phy ff e and others. i wish i could have been here to hear their comments and presentations. i think the unfortunate thing is that had this class been held not too many years ago, you would have had the benefit of hearing from some of the giants like dr. milton friedman and bill buckley and other friends of mine that i worked with over the years. in fact, it was milt friedman who met with me in chicago at a conference and we talked about

the concept of the all volunteer army in the 1960s, and he urged me, i was a young congressman, and he urged me to put in legislation that could move from a con script system to an all volunteer military and there were very strong arguments against it. people said that would be a mers naer military and of course what was happening in those days is we did have a draft system and people were told they had to serve. it was only a faction of the people. women did not serve, did not have to serve. teachers did not have to serve. students did not have to serve. conscientious objectors did not have to serve, and it was just a segment of the society that was told that they were going to not ones to serve and, by the way, the government was going to pay them about 50, 60, 70% of the what the civilian man power market was and milton friedman found that offensive, and i did in fact put in legislation and

testify before the house and senate armed services committee on the legislation and eventually thanks to president richard nixon it became law and the united states shifted to a different system which is really been a great benefit to our country. there is no question but that the armed forces today, the men and women, every single person is there because they want to be there. they raised their hands and said send me, and god blessed them for it. it was that concept of milton friedman's that he pushed and pushed early on. of course the flip side of that is that i also was involved in something that was quite apart from a conservative tradition. richard nixon went up to camp david back in 1970, i guess, and when he came back down, he had

decided to impose wage price controls on america and i remember george shulz came to me and said i want to run the controls for the united states of america and george said i don't believe in them and he said i know, don, that's why we want to you do it because it is such a bad idea. sure enough, they were imposed, and what we did was try to manage them so they didn't distort our economy so we wouldn't release a lot of the smaller companies, we had the larger companies report, and tried to manage them so that we did not disrupt the market system. one day i got a call from my friend milton friedman, and i said, don, are you doing a terrible job managing the wage price controls of the united states. i said you're wrong, i am doing a spectacular job. we're letting people out so we're not distorting the economy and we have no permanent employees. every person we hired was

detailed over so we could move them out and didn't create a permanent bureaucracy and milton said, i know that's what you're doing, but he said the problem is you're doing such a good job that people are going to get the wrong message and begin to believe that wage price controls actually work which you and i know they don't. and that was the other side of the conservative tradition. it is arguable, of course, that the modern political conservatism was launched by bill buckley and barry goldwater. there is no question but that it has done an enormous amount of good for people with president reagan at the helm we saw conservatism brought down the soviet union in large measure and communism. it helped spread freedom to places like eastern europe. the free market policies have been a major cause for the stunning economic growth in our

country, and other countries as well, like chile, south korea, japan to mention a few. i remember the first time i met bill buckley. i was called back as ambassador to nato to washington when gerald ford became president to chair his transition, and he had never been elected president or vice president. no one knew him around the world. i had been ambassador and had contacts in europe and he said, look, there is a conference going on in turkey and i want you to go there and explain to people who gerald ford is and what our policies are going to be that and doctor kistinger will be continuing as secretary of state and be reassuring and the name of the conference was just the opposite of the conservative tradition. supposedly it was the build a berg conference, and i went there to ismir, turkey, walked, looked around, didn't see too many people i knew and looked in

the back and the middle and there was bill buckley. i said, oh, my goodness, and i sat with him and he introduced me to a woman sitting next to him who i had never met, and we talked. it turned out the woman sitting next to him was a young, british, parliamentary ian who played a role in the conservative tradition. years later when president reagan asked me to become the special presidential envoy for the law of the sea he sent me to japan and germany and the netherlands and england and france to meet with the leadership to try to talk them out of supporting what was called the sea bed mining section of the law, the sea treaty, and one of the stops was in london, and i met on 10downing street with mrs. thatcher, and i started explaining to her exactly what the provision of the treaty would do, and i said basically what it does is it creates an

authority, quote, unquote, kind of an welingterm and it would be in charge of riches under the sa he and president reagan wants me to persuade you that he will not sign the treaty because he doesn't think it is a good thing for the country or the world and she looked at me and said, mr. ambassador, that sounds to me like the international nationalization of two thirds of the earth's surface. you know what i think of nationalization. she had been dismantling the nationalized industries in england and was very supportive. in any event, i am very pleased to be here. this is a terrific institution. it is a symbol of service throughout many decades now, and i thank each of you for your patriotism and your dedication. first let me make a couple of

comments about things i am not going to talk much about. the phrase, the first time i heard the phrase compassionate conservatism was a friend of mine named joe jacobs. he wrote a book entitled compassionate conservative, and he was a conservative, and he was compassionate, and he described that concept. this was back, i suppose, in the late 1970s, and he was a businessman who cared about the country greatly. he kind of talked about softening the edges of traditional conservatism, the image that republicans might be indifferent to the plight of the poor, this they may not understand minorities and the importance of equality under the law and equal opportunity. he was a thoughtful person, and i know that this topic has been

discussed before, so i will not belabor it. neoconservatism, my phone dog f ife spoke to that and i am sure many of you heard him. he is a thoughtful, knowledgeable person, and i read his remarks and found them most interesting and instructive. that period of the reagan administration and the ford administration and the nixon administration, we had this pressure for talk with the soviet union, and it was a theory that there were ways to find accommodations with the soviet union and richard nixon and actually lindon johnson began and richard nixon and gerald ford continued with secretary of state kissinger as the leader of that movement. the theory was not unrealistic. it was that you ought to be able

to find some areas of accommodation and if you are steely eyed and careful, you ought not to compromise so something you shouldn't compromise on but by the same token, you might try to reach out and see if you can achieve a relaxation of tension which the word dataut suggests. the problem with it was that the soviet union at the time was increasing its capabilities and was on an up trend. the united states was decreasing its capabilities on a relative basis and we were moving into a roughly a band of rough equivalents where they were superior in some areas, we were superior in some areas. i don't know any american military person that wanted to trade our military for theirs, but the trend lines were wrong. they were adverse to our interest without question, and there was a big debate in the united states about what they were spending as a percentage of

their gdp on defense and conservatives and neo conservativ conservatives, people like senator scoop jackson and others stepped up and expressed concern about detant as did i. my concern was a different one. it was clear to me we had to reverse the adverse trend. we had to invest in our military if we were going to have peace through strength and have the kinds of deterant capability necessary for our country to be able to contribute to peace and stability in the world and the problem with detante was is it hull of the pictures of our presidents and the secretaries of the communist party toasting each other with champagne glasses for agreements that were not really terribly important in the last analysis. it left the impression that, well, the soviets really weren't bad. they were not bad. they were kind of okay because we could have meetings and we

could have meals and clink our champagne glasses and the effect of that was to erode any interest in improving our definition inlt kas, to erode our willingness to step up and put a higher percentage of our gdp into defense. when i came to washington out of the navy in 1957 eisenhower administration, we were spending 10% of our gross domestic product on defense, same thing true in the kennedy administration, the johnson administration, and today i think we're spending about 4.5 or 4.6% of our gdp, so anyone would suggest that the debt that we're facing and the ush kring deficits are a result of the pentagon or the defense department are simply not looking at the facts. it is all in entitlements because we actually as a share of gdp we are half of where we were in the 50s, 60s, and in that period. in any event, the work was put

in and during the end of the ford administration and thanks to the later the reagan administration, the kinds of investment that were needed were actually achieved although the four years of the carter administration actually reduced defense capability during that period. a third thing i am not going to get into extensively andlier tear annism. we all wish we could live in a world where we could all be libertarians and have a small federal government but unfortunately that's not the kind of world we live in because the first responsibility of government is to provide for the security of the people, and we live in a world that's dangerous. we live in a world where weakness is provocative. we live in a world where the idea of another country providing global leadership forces one to say, well, which country do we want to do that if

not the united states? and that's tough to answer. you look around the world, and there are relatively few countries that think like we do, that have the same values, that have the same capabilities that we do, and so i think most conservatives agree on the need for smaller government, less taxes, less regulation, and separating private lives from government, but many of us disagree on the subject of foreign policy. i simply do not believe that the idea of some form of isolationism is a realistic thing in the world we live in today. i was speaking at leavenworth the other day to i think 1,400 plus majors, and i suppose some lieutenant colonels, and they asked me what do you worry about when you go to bed at night? i remember i was asked that question by a senator from

kansas when i was being confirmed for the pentagon back in 2001, and my answer was in effect intelligence. it is a complicated world. they're closed societies. there is a lot we don't know, and it is a dangerous world, and i woer about intelligence. i didn't answer that question that way at leavenworth the other day. i answered it differently t goes right to this point of our country's, i believe, responsibility to contribute to peace and stability in the world. i answered by saying i worry about weakness on our part. i worry about our withdrawal. i worry about our management of our economic affairs. no one thing specific. i could have said korea. i could have said iran. i could have said terrorism. i could have said any number of things but i said what i really worry about is a sense in the world that the united states is withdrawing, that we're less willing to contribute to peace and stability because if you believe as i do that weakness is

provocative, that it is strength that preserves the peace, then a weakness causes people to think about doing things they wouldn't even think about doing if they saw the united states behaving in a way that suggested we were not withdrawing but that we were there, around, capable, not the policeman for the world, not the nation builder for other countries, but the country that was there and willing to contribute to peace and stability. the few things i will touch on as mallory said, i am going to talk a bit about the age of terrorism, the iraq war, the freedom agenda that's been discussed, the challenges of fighting a war, the first war in history in the information age, and law fair, and also a few comments about the inadequacy of

our institutions, our domestic institutions as well as our international institutions. first, the age of terrorism. my first experience with that was when president reagan asked me to be middle east envoy after 241 marines and navy core man were killed in beruit at the airport, and you will recall a truck loaded with explosives drove into the barracks where the marines and the navy corpsmen were billeted and blew it up, and we put some forces in along with two or three other countries and things were not going well, and i got a call from george schultz and president reagan asking me to leave the company i was running, a pharmaceutical company at the time, and leave that and help out, so i did, and it was a new experience for me who kind of served in the pentagon during

the cold war and here was something that was notably different than the cold war. it was terrorism. i remember at that time people were writing books and giving lectures about the end of history if you remember that, the theory was that communism was kind of behind us and i ended up speaking to the u.s. army association and talking about terrorism, and i said to them, look, as lennen wrote, back in october of 1984, 17 years before september 11, 2001, and i said first as len in wrote with characteristic terseness the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize. it is not to kill people, it is to terrorize and alter their behavior. it is a technique. terrorism is growing, i said, in the 30 days ending last week, 17

years before 2001, in the 30 days ending last week it is estimated that there were 37 terrorist attacks by 13 different organizations against the property of citizens of 20 different countries. this is 1984. i pointed out that terrorism is not the random work of isolated mad men. rather, it is state sponsored by nations using it as a central element of their foreign policy. i went on to say that terrorism works. my point was that a single attack by a small, weak element, not even a nation, maybe an entity of some kind, a network, a terrorist attack by a small, weak nation, or entity, by influencing public opinion and morale can alter the behavior of great nations and force tribute from wealthy nations.

unchecked, state sponsored terrorism is adversely changing the balance of power in our world. i went on and i said that while security is important, terrorists can attack any time, any place, using any technique, and it is physically impossible to defend at every moment of the day or night against every conceivable technique, and that being the case, i went on to say that terrorism is a form of warfare, and it has to be treated as such. we can't think that we can defend against it. i watched what happened in beruit. truck goes into the barracks. kills 241. so the next day they put re vetmentes around the buildings, concrete things around. so what do they do? terrorists started lobbing rocket propelled grenades over, so the next thing they did was the u.s. embassy on the core

nation beruit hung a wire mesh over it to bounce the rocket propelled grenades off. sounds logical. for every offense there is a defense. for every defense there is an offense. so what did they do? the next thing they did is started hitting soft targets, people going to and from work. the point is there isn't any way to simply defend. that causes anyone with an ounce of sense to say that must you must going on offense. the only way you can deal with that problem is not to treat it like a criminal act where once it happens you're going to capture the person and then put him in jail or punish him or do it him in ab sen sha because you can't find him, he is gone, and in any event that is the lessons i came away with back in 1984.

the election took place in 2000. shortly before that governor bush came and spoke at the citadel and talked about the future and the noo he had to bring the military and armed forces into the united states and out of the industrial age and into information age. and then name 9/11, a day that cast a shadow over the entire bush administration. the attack on the seat of economic power in new york, the attack on the seat of military power in the pentagon, and except for the courage of the passengers on the flight that was brought down in shanksville, pennsylvania, undoubtedly an aattack on the seated political powery, the white house, the

congress, the capitol, and it was a day none of us will ever forget. the president of the united states properly recognized that the purpose of terrorism was to terrorize and alter our behavior and cause us to change the way we live, and he did something, made a decision, that was notably different from our country's behavior through different administrations of both political parties and the preceding period, and decided that they had to go on the offense and use the phrase that was cited earlier that given the lethalitie of weapons in this decade, after 2001, and the risk it could be not 3,000 people, but 300,000, caused him to

conclude that he had to declare a war on that and do everything conceivable not to defend only but to reach out and make everything that terrorists do harder, make it harder for them to move around between countries, harder to talk on the phone, harder to get money. harder to raise funds through the financial americas. harder to find a country that would be willing to house them and be hos pitable to their planning and training and launching of attacks on free people. in my view it was the right decision. he was criticized for it because it was different. that's understandable. he put in place a structure over a period of a year or two, a structure that was designed to deal with a notably different set of problems than conventional war and the kinds

of problems we basically faced in earlier periods. it is hard for people to adjust to that, to understand different approaches, but it was a distinctly different approach. at the time i should add i think it was johns hopkins university had a group of people come in, mostly from the previous administrations, the clinton administration, the herbert walker bush administration, and they did an analysis they ended up describing as dark winter where they theorized the placing of small pox in three locations in the united states, major metropolitan hubs with air terminals, and within a year it concluded, this independent study concluded that there would be more than a million americans dead as a result of that, not a

nuclear attack, not a chemical attack, but in effect a biological attack and not a complicated one, not something that takes a lot of money or a lot of skill sets. imagine a million people. imagine our country if the goal of terrorism is to terrorize and alter your behavior, imagine what the behavior pattern would have been in our country. there would be marshal law. you would have people guarding state boundaries to try to avoid. when i grew up, if you had small pox or chickenpox or measles they put a quarantine sign on your house and you weren't allowed to go out and no one was allowed to go in your house. this was in the 1930s. you can imagine the whole country do doing that, petrified because of the lack of protection against small pox. that was very much in the president's mind and in the people in government's minds that that danger that 3,000 was

a terrible, terrible event, but that a million because of small pox and the ease, relative ease of imposing that kind of lethal itie on our society by people, not armed countries, not major armys, navys or air forces, so the structure the president put in place, mixture of things, the patriot act, military commissions, guantanamo bay, these were military commissions were old. they had been going on in our country since george washington. there was nothing really new about that. the armed forces of the united states had experience managing detention of prisoners of war, people who wore uniforms, carried their weapons openly, had a command structure. all they had to say was their name, rank and serial number and they could not give you any

additional information nor could you get any additional information unless they decided they wanted to give it to you. that was what the armed forces was organized and trained and equipped to do. we were not organized, trained or equipped to deal with terror. nor in an environment where the lethalitie assist dark winter suggested was as grave for our country. so everyone was dealing with a new circumstance as was the president. the president made a decision to go after the terrorists in afghanistan, and we put together a plan with the central intelligence agency where with very small number of u.s. military forces and a very small number of cia people and a lot of assistance, supplies going to the northern alliance and some militias in the south were able to