election. and i think it contributed to our defeat. but the thing i really loved when i think about it was when president ford died were reminded of. they will make the decision and stick by it. and he was a remarkable man. and as i look back now, i think one of the things that proved that was in fact his decision to pardon nixon. >> let's go to anna, west state university. >> thank you for being here first of all. i'm going to go back to the beginning a little bit. you start interning in d.c. and worked your way up to chief of staff and then eventually vice president. do you feel your internship was vital to the process, and what kind of lessons did you learn

there that you couldn't have learned anywhere else? >> well, the internships were vital. it wasn't like it was an extensive career, which is by the way, the way congress ought to be in 40 days. but that was my first political experience. and when i entered that i was sort of nonpartisan. i was a graduate student. then i worked for the governor of wisconsin for a year. and out of that i got the opportunity to go to washington as a congressional fellow. which was a yearlong proposition and also i had to feed my family. i really thought i wanted to be ma political science professor.

and wisconsin is a great school. very strong department. what i found after i had been back here and based in part on the early experiences, was i decided i was much more interested in doing it than i was teaching about it. so when it came time for me after we lost the '76 election, and i had to go find something to do. what i really wanted to do was go run for congress. and i was impressed and felt very strongly that if somebody like jerry ford, don rumsfeld, could serve in congress that was honest work, these were great guys who gave me tremendous opportunity. so it really is -- it was those

experiences that led to the change in my basic life and i never did finish the dissertation. i never did get my ph.d. i never did go back and teach. probably some political adversaries in wyoming who wish i had, instead of running for congress. but i got caught up in the political wars, and i loved it. it was fascinating. it was interesting. it was something that -- it was fundamentally changed my life. i was serving in the house of representatives back in the '80s. >> thank you. >> there is a juxtaposition in the book, which is emblematic of the american process. you began the morning of january 20th, 1977, in the white house, and by mid afternoon, you and your family are having lunch in mcdonald's at andrew's air force base. >> yes. >> take that met fore and what that tells you about politics in

america. >> well, it was a unique kind of experience to go through. i didn't know at the time i would get a chance to go back to the white house or back to eern levels of the government. we lost the election in '76. jimmy carter was taking over. and on january 20th i road up to capitol hill in the president's motorcade, and we swore? president carter and then got on the presidential helicopter and flew over the city a couple of times. and then out to andrew's air force base. the president got off the helicopter and got on air force one. and it was the first time in as

his plane took off, a guy in a french coat came out and he laid it on the the ground in front of us. i was there with the military assistance and so forth. the guys that worked with him as chief of staff. he said, okay, i need your radios. he said it's been great working with you guys. we stopped at the air force base and had a leisurely lunch. big macs. it was interesting because at that moment i was out of work. had two looks. lynn, my wife, was finishing up her ph.d. she finished and i didn't.

we had to decide what to do. that's when i made the basic decision that i wanted to go home to wyoming. if i was going to run for office, that was the place to do it. so that spring as soon as school was out, we loaded up a u haul truck and hauled off to wyoming and that fall the congressman announced his retirement. everybody thought he was going to run for re-election. he didn't. that was my opening. i jumped in and won a tough primary and then won the general lerks. so less than two years i was back here. >> there's a story that you tell when you were running for re-election and one of your constituents didn't know who you were. >> that happened on more than one occasion.

you know the story. >> my favorite story had to do with the fellow down in torington, the house painter. this is one of these guys that runs all the time and never wins anything, but he ran his dog one year. that was an insult when he ran the dog. we were at a big barbecue. he came a long way down in wyoming across the nebraska border. all the farm crews were out that day. and i had a guy come up to me at the barbecue, as i recall.

and he asked me, he said, son, are you a democrat. i said, no sir. he said, are you a lawyer? i said, no. he said i'll vote for you. no offense, norm. >> sarah keller. >> thank you for being with us today first of all. so you served as the chief of staff in the ford white house. and then later obviously as the vice president with president george w. bush. i was wondering for you could tell us the similarity and differences between those two roles in the white house and how your position as the chief of staff helped you be are better prepared to serve as the vice president. >> that's a good question. when you're studying political science, and i came away as a student and scholar.

we were trying to identify constitutional factors to look and see in each congress or presidency what they had in common. after i was involved doing it for a while, i changed my sort of my attitude in terms of what was significant, and concluded especially from the standpoint of the white house and the president that was what was really distinctive about the job is that it was different for every president. and it depended on the time in which they governed. you usually couldn't forecast what they had to deal with. when i ran with then governor bush, we were focused on a lot of domestic issues.

focused on that. eight months into the administration 9/11 happened and 3,000 americans were killed by a terrorist that morning. and that fact and our responsibility to defend against any further attacks dominated the presidency for the next seven years. that was the prime focus. the other thing that was crucial and vital, is the personality or personal characteristics of the individual behind the desk in the oval office. and it's very hard to predict, you know, how dwight eisenhower may have dealt with the kind of thing we had to deal with. or fdr who had not only world war ii, but also the depression to cope with. we were fortunate to have individuals who could step up

and do what needed to be done. but it's interesteding. i just finished a book on dwight eisenhower by a man named gene edward smith. it covers his life. and what i come away with is a much higher regard for president eisenhower than the conventional wisdom in d.c. from time to time. they'll list presidents and the historians will rank order them in terms of who was the best and so forth. i would have to say they bear almost no resemblance at all to my experience in terms of how i look on those individuals but the chief of staff is very different than the vice president. it's focused on what the president needs done.

he needs someone around from early in the morning to late at night. and who can speak to the authority of the president. never abuse it. noefr mistake his own position as chief of staff for what the president is doing. you only have one president. he's the guy who runs for office. you're totally expendable as chief of staff. and it's very important that you function, i think in a way that emphasizes the staff part of the title. we have from time to time had chiefs of staff that didn't do that. they spent a lot of time in front of the tv camera they sought the ability to be a major public player or voice their views on various issues or sometimes try to manage the process to get the policy outcome they want. you're there to serve the president. he needs somebody in the job

that has total confidence to carry out his instructions and do what he needs to have done. the vice president on the other hand may or may not have much to do. it's very interesting proposition. part of it is you're there in case something happens to the president. beyond that, it's up to the president in what his relationship is in terms with the vice president. in terms of how much you are asked to do and what we get to do. we've had a lot of vice presidents that nobody remembers because they were never asked to do anything. in my situation, the first time i was offered a chance to be on the list torks be considered for the job, i said no. had a good private sector job. had 25 years in politics. i didn't want to come back to washington.

hoe put me in charge of the search committee. cheney went to work and searched and searched and found himself. that's how he got to be vice president. that's the charge that was made. it's a very different function. you're not in charge of anything. you're not in charge of the white house staff. you're not secretary of defense commanding 4 million people, troops and civilians running the pressurery department. there's a hunl members between cabinet members and vice president on one hand and staff on the other. i love both jobs. they were fascinating but very different. >> so why did it not work? they didn't like the job of vice president. nor did lyndon johnson al gore

said he had a lot of responsible. so what works and what doesn't? >> well, the norm has been to go back over, and i guess i was the 46th vice president. and you look at what the typical pattern has been, my guess is he may have somebody here who is really diligent student who can name all our vice presidents, but i couldn't. and often times it's been described various ways by other politicians or the vice presidents themselves. some of them weren't allowed to go to cabinet meetings. eisenhower and nixon had a strained relationship. they didn't really know each other before nixon was picked. it was never a close relationship. a lot of that had to do with nixon's own background. he was a supreme ally and

commander in europe, throughout world war ii. he ran a military style operation. and there really isn't any place in that, you can have a deputy commander. you can have a chief of staff who runs things on behalf of supreme allied commander. his whole style of operation was very much to delegate a lot of authority down, especially to the cabinet. in other cases president bush would spend a lot of time thinking about it. and when he asked him to help him find somebody i had the opportunity over several months to hear him talk about what kind of individual he was looking for. and what he really wanted was somebody who could be part of the team.

and heavily involved in policymaking. that's, in effect, what he offered me what he said to me after we finished the search, he turned and said, dick, you're the solution to my problem. and then at that point, you know, he bafly put the arm on me and the few days later made the decision to sign me on. but it worked well in our case. i got to do an awful lot. part of it was because i happen to have a set of experiences as secretary of defense on the intelligence committee and the congress and so forth that was very relevant after 9/11. and so i was a valuable commodity in that sense. and he asked me to spend a lot of time on those kinds of issues. but i became persuaded that he wasn't worried about a big state. wyoming is the smallest state in terms of population. we only have three electoral

votes. it turned out that those three electoral votes were the difference between victory and defeat. that wasn't ordinarily the case. i didn't have any special appeal in terms of ethnicity or gender or there's a lot of reasons people talk about hiring vice presidents. but he decided that he wanted me, primarily because of my past experience, and i would guess also, he probably consulted with his father, that he might work if, and secretary of defense back in the early '90s when he was president. i think all of those things came together. >> just to go back quickly, the chief of staff, you make it a point in your book, your code name was backseat. >> right. it was. i took it as a point of honor. the secret service had given me that. and we had a form, my staff did when i left just before we

turned things over. and they gave me the backseat out of an old beat up junker of a car. it had rats living in it. it was really a bad piece of equipment. in terms of keeping your head down and doing everything you can nor the president and trying to stay out of the line of fire. >> jeremy hunt. >> thank you very much for taking the time out of your schedule to speak with us today. you ever felt like times where you stood alone, and how did you handle the issue or the situation? >> well, there were times when i guess i felt outnumbered. that's easy to do sometimes when you're a republican in a house run by the democrats, for

example. but i had the attitude, i suppose i'm trying to think of some of the controversies we were involved in. some of the strongest controversy surrounded some of our post-9/11 policies. we had to do a couple of things that i felt were very important. the president made the basic decision, signed off on it. i didn't do it by myself. but one was to set up our terrorist surveillance program that let us collect intelligence on people calling from outside the united states to people inside the united states, if we had reason to believe that that call may have come from an al qaeda-type. and the other was our enhanced interrogation techniques. that we applied to a handful of al qaeda terrorists when we captured them. that were controversial.

i won't bore you today here with all the who struck johns. but we were very careful to make sure they were legal, we stayed within the limits, but we did develop techniques that were absolutely vital in collecting information from people like khalid shaikh mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. we captured him in the spring of '03. he wasn't cooperative at the outset. after he'd been involved with the enhanced interrogation technique, ie, waterboarding, he decided he wanted to cooperate and was a wealth of invaluable information for us in terms of our putting together our program to -- well, to defend the nation against al qaeda. panetta, leon panetta, whether he was cia director at the time they got osama bin laden said he believed their ability to get bin laden had been influenced in part by a lot of the intelligence we collected

through that means. before and that gradually led to the location of bin laden when president obama and the s.e.a.l.s took him out. >> let's go to zachary who is next, from tennessee. >> yeah, mr. vice president, thank you for joining us at the washington center today. my name's zachary. i'm from tennessee tech university. i just like to know what attribute do you have as an older professional that you wished you'd had, you know, whenever you were a younger professional in washington. >> well, i'd almost state it the other way. in terms of what -- now that i'm an older professional, thank you for -- >> experienced, how's that? >> experienced. no, one of the most valuable experiences that i learned over time that i did not have when i started is i thought when i started that the quality of my contribution was directly related to how many hours a day

i put in at my desk. and the longest offer i stayed and the harder i worked, the more i was contributing. that was sort of my mind-set. that wasn't true. what i didn't understand till later was there was such a thing as quality. and that it was important not just to be at your desk, you know, sending memos out and responding to memos. you got to do all that thing. but it's much, much better to be organized in a way that you had good help, good staff, working for you, that you could get them to focus on things and give them guidance on what they ought to be doing. and then focus on the big issues yourself. but also to pace yourself. to take that time to occasionally grab a day with the family. seven days a week, sometimes is necessary in the midst of a crisis. but as a steady diet, it will wear you down. i also had made the mistake of smoking two or three packs a day

when i was younger. the last one i had was when they wheeled me into the emergency room with my first heart attack. but that came only about two years after i left the white house. and there's something to be said for the notion that the way i lived during that first cycle in government if you will, drinking a lot of block coffee, smoking cigarettes, not getting much sleep or exercise. you know, to some extent, i brought it on myself because i didn't take care of myself. what i learned over the years since is that there is such a thing as quality and sometimes less is more. but it's very important if you're going to make a career out of it, as i have, and pursue it over a long period of time, you really need to develop that capacity. to know what's important and what's less important. and to be able to focus on the big things and don't sweat the small stuff. >> great, thank you. in your book, this is at the

conclusion, but it might be a question on the state of american politics, you wrote this, you said our political battles are messy, shrill and sometimes cruel. yet for all of that, you say the system has a way of producing courageous and compassionate action when it is needed the most. so in terms of what you're seeing today, in congress, in american politics, what are your thoughts? >> well, i'm still looking for it in this cycle. i think about it -- when i'm asked today lots of time, people will say, isn't that the worst period? the rhetoric's harsher. the relationships are more strained. people are nastier to one another. then i hark back and i think, well, let's see, when i came to washington in the summer of 1968, martin luther king had just been assassinated. bobby kennedy had just been

assassinated. the cities had been in flames as a result of the riots and protests that came out of that. whether i arrived to find an apartment to live in, i just came down for a day and went back to wisconsin. they had troops stationed on the steps of the capitol. elements of the 82nd airborne had been moved into washington to maintain order during that period of time. 12 people had been killed in rioting here that summer. and, you know, that was a difficult time. we -- what we went through, a civil war, the bloodiest conflict in our history. over 600,000 dead. and it was oftentimes we look at it and a time like now and say, gee, it's really gotten -- gotten not bad and nasty out there. they don't remember the struggle we had, example, end slavery and build freedom and democracy as

we know it today. so some of those struggles have been very, very tough and very difficult. what we go through today, we got a lot of people talking as though this is the worst of all times. but it's not. we've got a media operation now that tends to dramatize events. partly because that improves ratin ratings. i'm not saying that negatively. but if you look at our history of a nation and as a people, we've come through some very difficult times. we've survived. we've prospered. we've gotten a lot more right than wrong. i think back on those times, i feel pretty good about things. we'll get through this too. this is difficult. won't deny it. we're not making much progress.

obviously, i'm a republican. i don't agree with the administration. but we're about to have an election. and it will be a good, tough, hard-fought election. that's as it should be. we all get a chance to participate. and that's pretty rare. that doesn't happen very many places in the world. >> our last student question from corey, ball state. >> yes, say, our great moderator has addressed the question i initially had. as interns, we're not always going to agree with the stances our supervisors have. you have been more outspoken in supportive of gay rights but were more silent in washington. was it a difficult decision for you to be more silent while you had a podium in washington? what advice would you give to us for rt inevitable conflict we will face in our careers? >> i didn't feel like i was silent about it. one of my daughters is gay. we've lived with that as a

family. we crossed that bridge a long time ago. i remember in my first vice presidential debate in 2000 against joe lieberman i made a strong statement about how freedom means freedom for everybody. and that people ought to be able to make a choice of their own and so it's not been from my standpoint something i spend a lot of time worrying about. i think there has been a significant i guess process of enlightenment over the course of the last several years. things have changed a lot since i first came to washington. i think it's important obviously if you feel strongly about an issue that you jump in with both feet if you want and get actively and aggressively involved in it. that's a different proposition than if