i believe it was the first week in march. we came in in january 20th so it was a very traumatic time, and nobody really knew at first what had happened. we didn't -- at first we got conflicting reports as to whether he'd actually been hit. what -- what most people don't know is that president reagan came very close to dying from -- from -- not from the wound quite frankly but from an infection that set in after they had performed surgery on him. that -- that's probably well known out there now, but at the time it wasn't particularly well known, but it was quite a shock to those of us in the white house. we were new. a lot of us were new to the job, and then to have the president shot in an assassination attempt. you don't know whether he's going to live or not, it was very traumatic. it was a very difficult period.

one of the things that we did or i should say didn't do which has receive a lot of attention, is we did not invoke the 25th amendment which says that when the president becomes incapacitated the cabinet is to meet and turn power over to the vice president. well, the vice president was in texas when president reagan was shot. of course, he got the sec seek was in communication, he got on air force two and was headed back to washington. i was over at the hospital with the other senior white house advisers, and -- and we talked about whether to -- and president reagan was about to go into surgery. and we talked about whether to invoke the 25th amendment. we concluded that it would not be the right thing to do because the doctors told us he would only be under the anesthetic for a very short period of time. remember, this was back in the cold war when the threat of nuclear conflict was still quite alive, but we didn't think it

would be the right thing to do, and i will -- i will say this. the vice president of the united states, george h.w. bush, was -- was not anxious to see the 25th amendment invoked because he had been the last competitor standing against ronald reagan in the nomination fight in 1980. and he didn't want people to think somehow he was trying to take over some power. i had been his campaign manager. i was the white house chief of staff. if i had said we're going to invoke the 25th amendment and give power to george bush, there might have been a little more than a little muttering in the white house, so -- so we decided not to do that, but i -- i will say this. i had the concurrence of president reagan's longtime advisers in taking that course. edwin meese agreed with me and some others, and as it turned out everything was fine. president -- vice president bush was so conscious of the fact that he had been the last

standing competitor that when he came back to washington they were going to take the helicopter and land on the south lawn. he said, no, you're not, that's where the president lands. i'm not going to land there. we're going to go to the naval observatory which was the vice president's residence. >> what was the relationship between president ford and president reagan like, especially after the 1976 primary challenge? >> well, you want me -- oh, that's a comparison question. i don't think i'm giving away any secrets to say not all that good at that time. it later became -- it later became better. that was a very tough primary, and it's -- it's quite natural that -- with competition like that, there's going to be some tension, and there was some, and there was some on -- on both sides. i have written two books about

my political and public service. the last one was more about my political service, and what -- i was telling susan earlier. there's a chapter in there where i'm sitting in the oval office with president reagan, just the two of us, because i was his chief of staff. even though i ran two campaigns against him, get this, get this, i was president ford's delegate hunter in the contest of the nomination governor reagan, and we won, and then i was george h.w. bush's campaign manager against ronald reagan in the fight for the nomination in 1980, and yet ronald reagan asked me to be his white house chief of staff. now, somebody explain that to me. and we were -- we were sitting in the white house just reflecting on a lot of these events, and i said, you know, mr. president, i said if president ford had asked you to -- to come on the ticket with him in 1976, it's my opinion he

would have been elected. we would have won that election. that 10,000 votes would not have been a problem, and -- and you might never have been president, and he said that's probably right. he said, but i will tell you this, jim. if the president had asked me to take that position, i would have felt duty bound to do it. now, that's not totally consistent with what the reagan campaign told the ford campaign in 1976 when we said let's -- after the nomination fight. we said let's have a unity meeting, and the reagan campaign said we'll have a unity meeting provided you won't ask governor reagan to be on the ticket, and we said okay because president ford didn't want to ask him to be on the ticket, and reagan didn't want to be on the ticket. you asked about the tension. there it was, okay? >> what was your biggest challenge as secretary of state in the bush 41 administration? >> well, you know, i've said to people that i was an

extraordinarily fortunate individual to be secretary of state when i was. we used to live in a bipolar world where we had the soviet union and the united states. it was the cold war, and then the soviet union collapsed. communism -- soviet union imploded. communism collapsed. the wall came down, and we were in a unipolar world. the united states was the only superpower out there, and everybody wanted to get close to uncle whiskers, and i was secretary of state at the time. my job was a hell of a lot easier because everybody wanted to get close to the only remaining superpower. and so we got a lot of things done. what did we do? we were able to preside over a peaceful end to the cold war. the cold war didn't have to end peacefully. it could have ended with a bang instead of a whimper. we had the first gulf war where we kicked iraq out of kuwait with really minimal casualties, and by the way, we got other

countries to pay for it. we had the madrid peace conference where israel and all of her arab neighbors sat down face-to-face to talk peace for the first time. we had the unification of germany and a lot of things happened. you asked me what the toughest challenge was. trying to figure out -- i really believe this, trying to figure out where to concentrate because we were in such a position -- we were in a position to get so many things done and trying to figure out exactly what to concentrate on. i'm not sure we handled the breakup of the former yugoslavia very well. that was a -- that was perhaps the -- the greatest challenge. >> as secretary of state, what were your experiences with the fall of the berlin wall? >> well, we were -- we were fortunate to -- to be in power when it happened, and i -- i

credit every american president, democrat and republican going all the way back to the beginning of the cold war, for the fact that america was triumphant in the cold war because every president, democrat or republican, and every administration was steadfast in fighting the cold war on behalf of the american people, and that's why we ultimately prevailed. i happen to be hosting a lunch in the dining room state department for corazon aquino who was the president of the philippines when i got a message from the under secretary of state for political affairs saying these germans were going to let people go through the wall. i could tell that was going to be big, big stuff, and it was, and by nightfall it was huge. and so i picked up the phone and called president bush and excused myself from dinner and went over to the white house.

we spent the rest of the day over there talking about how we were going to -- how we were going to deal with that matter. but we were -- i think we did it right. as i said, we continued to work president bush number 41 was smart enough not to dance on the wall. everybody -- the press were all over him saying why aren't you showing more emotion? you've won a 40-year conflict here, and you're just taking it as a matter of fact. well, he didn't want to stick it in the eye of gorbachev and the continuing leadership of the soviet union because he knew we had to continue to work with them to make sure that everything came from -- everything ended totally peacefully, and we did that. and one of the most important things we did, i think, was to unify germany in peace and freedom as a member of the north atlantic treaty organization. we didn't have very long to get that done. we had a narrow window of opportunity, but we got it done, and it's still now one germany, and it's really important that that get done in that short time frame.

>> we're going to go back to a ford administration question that we talked about a little bit earlier today when we were touring the exhibits. what do you think was the impact of the helsinki accords on the cold war? >> i think that was a -- i think that's one of the most significant accomplishments of president ford and it's been very under -- it's really been underreported and underappreciated. the helsinki accords gave everyone who -- who wanted to support freedom for captive people, captive people of eastern and central europe or elsewhere in arab countries, gave them the -- the -- gave them a chance to argue for freedom and human rights and individual freedoms for people because that's some of the things that were contained in the helsinki accords. as i told you when we were touring the exhibits, one of the

things that was in the accords though that has been observed by -- by its breach is a provision in the helsinki accord saying borders will only be changed through peaceful means. that was one of the problems we had in the breakup of the former yugoslavia. these countries wanted slovenia, croatia, some of them wanted to declare independence, seize the border posts around them, and i went over to belgrade and i said if you do this, you're going to kick off one heck of a civil war. there were five -- you know, yugoslavia was only kept together by the authoritarianism and totalitarianism of tito, and once they started agitating for separation, we told them we thought it would end up in a big civil war, and it did. but the helsinki accords was a very, very important achievement of president ford's administration. >> help us understand why bush 41 was not successful in being

re-elected. >> well, i would say there are three reasons. first of all, he had a sorry campaign manager, me. [ laughter ] but secondly -- there were three reasons. we'd been there 12 years, okay? i mean, two reagan terms. bush was reagan's vice president. we'd been there two reagan terms. that's eight years and one bush term. the press particularly were tired of us. they really were tired of us, and we were climbing a high -- a tough mountain. there was another major problem. that's reason number one. i think a lot of people were tired of us. we'd been there 12 years. it's very hard to keep the white house for more than eight years, for any party, if you go back and look at history. there's not many times when it's happened, and we had kept it for

12. secondary, we had a little jug-eared fellow from texas named ross perot that you may or may not have heard of, and he took -- ross perot took 19% of the vote. clinton got 43%. bush got 38%, and perot got 19%, and our polling showed us perot was taking two out of three votes and when you take two thirds of 43 and add it to 38, then you get to 51. when people say he didn't cost you the election i think he did. i'll say it again. i thought he did for 20 years, and i still think he did, but the third thing was our fault, absolutely, and that is instead of going up to capitol hill in

january of 1992 when president bush 41 was at 90% approval rating and -- and saying, okay, desert storm was a great success. now we're going to do domestic storm and i'm going to focus on the domestic problems facing this country, and here's an economic program that's going to get that done, if we had done that, i think we might have won that election notwithstanding ross perot, but we didn't do that, and that was a mistake. >> let's talk about another election, and this is the one in 2000 with the vote recount. we have two questions about what are the common misperceptions about the events surrounding the recount, and just another on that same, could you discuss that? >> i can discuss the recount. i don't know what people's misconceptions are about it. i can tell you a few factual things. number one, we were never behind in any count whatsoever, ever of all the counts that were taken.

the press went in -- you know, all the hanging chads and ballots were all saved. the "new york times," miami -- a miami paper, i can't remember which one, these are not exactly fans of republican candidates often. they went and did their own survey of these ballots, and they said under no scenario could gore have won after they looked at those ballots, so there's a fairly independent look at it. i think that -- i think it's -- i used to say that after the 1976 election where we lost by only 10,000 votes out of 81 million, i remember thinking to myself that night at 3:30 in the morning, boy, is this something. this is -- this is the closest -- this is going to be the closest presidential election of your lifetime. well, it wasn't the closest presidential election in my life.

537 votes. but a couple of other things i'll say about that, in addition to the fact that we never were -- never lost a recount. we were never behind in the count. we won any number of court cases, and, yes, we won the supreme court -- the final case, and a lot of people say oh, well, you were just given the presidency on a 5-4 decision of the united states supreme court. that's simply not true. the vote on constitutionality in that case in the supreme court of the united states was 7-2. justice breyer, a democrat, voted with the republicans and justice souter voted -- voted with a dissenting democrat, i think justice ginsberg, so in effect you had a bipartisan decision on constitutionality and then they took up the question of remedy after they said that the scheme that the florida legislature has put in

place for recount is -- is illegal, unconstitutional, and then they said the time has expired for further recount because by gore's own admission, the critical date was december 12th and this was december 11th. they said there's no longer any time to count. the gore campaign made a big mistake when they asked for recounts in only four counties, and they were pro-democratic counties, all of them, very heavy democratic counties, and they asked for a recount instead of a statewide recount that should have come in. when they did that, that gave us the high ground, and their mantra was count every vote, count every vote. our mantra was, look, we've counted them five times, six times, seven times, and every time we count them we win, and so finally the supreme court said, yeah, that's right.

the supreme court also said that the florida legislature could not change the rules of the game after the game had started, and under the constitution the legislatures of the various states have the ability to determine how presidential electors are selected and florida had a law, but once all this recount business started and all this multiplicity of lawsuits, and by the way, we had a whole lot of lawsuits, i mean, maybe hundreds, that the supreme court said you can't change the rules of the game after it started. >> you'll be pleased to know that we're going to move from the presidents with whom you've worked to some current affairs questions. following the post-cold war euphoria, how and when did things go wrong leading to the difficult situation that the u.s. finds itself in today? >> well, i don't buy the assumption that the united states is in decline. i mean, you go out and you read the papers today. everybody is oh, it's terrible. we're in such bad shape. if we're in such bad shape, why is it that everybody wants to

come here? nobody wants to go anywhere else. we're not -- we're not in good shape today. we have some humongous problems. our big debt bomb out there. we have debt-to-gdp of over 100% program for the next five years. that's unsustainable. we continue to spend beyond our means. we've got to find a way to do something about that. but i don't buy the argument that we're on the downhill slide. when i was treasury secretary for president reagan, the japanese were coming in and buying up, and they would say, well, america is so down to it. japan is going to rule the world. guess what? didn't happen. they just just have 15 year of terrible economic times. we've got a lot after things going for us.

you know, people compare us to china. well china's growth is a really amazing thing. it's important. we need to acknowledge it. it's significant, but we've got some strengths strengths that t have and one of them is our political system our principles and ideals. does anybody out there doubt that our political system will be any different years from now than it is today and would anybody hazard the same guess about china? i don't think so. so i don't buy all this stuff about how the united states is in terminal or permanent decline. we do have some serious problems. we've got to figure out how to stop the spending and we have to live within our means and that means we've got to deal with everything defense, entitlements, revenue, the whole deal, but i will tell you one

other thing that i learned from eight years of service to president reagan. you don't resolve a deficit problem just by raising taxes. you do need revenue, but if you don't have spending restraint, i mean legal spending restraint, you can raise taxes until the cows come home and you'll never deal with the deficit because congress will spend the money you raise in taxes and then they'll spend more and the only time we've ever gotten a handle on it to any extent was really during the george h.w. bush administration when we had legal spending restraint and enforceable spending restraint with the hollings restraints. so we've got a lot of problems, but i don't buy the argument that something terrible has happened to us. that's simply not true. we ought not to worry about the fact that brazil and india and

china are moving up in the world and i think it's more a case of they're moving up than the united states going down. why are they moving up? they're moving up because these countries have embraced our paradigm of free market economics and we ought to welcome that. yes, they're competitors now. they didn't used to be, some of them and we'll have to compete with them and i think we're positioned to compete with them very effectively. >> how do you review the iraq group, with the foreign policy during the arab spring? >> i don't know that i've thought about it in comparison to the arab spring. what we said was that at the time we took a look at it we went over there. we were given full access to all of the policymakers and cia and all of the others and what we said was the situation, this was in december 2006.

we said the situation in iraq is grave and deteriorating and it was and the administration -- by the way, we had a provision in the iraq study group report supporting a surge provided it was short term and provided that the commanders on the ground recommend it. that's what the president ended up doing and it turned out to be to some extent and degree successful, but i've got to tell you, i think the jury is still out a bit on what the final result will be in iraq. it's certainly a lot better than it was when we were over there in 2006, but i don't think we've seen the end of it yet and i hope that things don't degenerate until we're fully out of there at the end of this year, but weir coming out. it's over and certainly the world is better off to be rid of

saddam hussein, but we don't know what the final situation is going to be and we don't know the extent to which iran may be emboldened and strengthened. i think the one thing the iraq study report did was to focus the attention of policymakers and the policy to some extent on the fact that we needed to change what we were doing in there and we needed to find a way to do a better job so we could lead. we can't stand these countries and the same is true for afghanistan. >> in your role as former secretary of state can you give us a thumbnail state of the union particularly as it is related for national security risks for our country? >> well, we still have significant national security risk. of course, the terrorism risk

still very much out there. we've got to remain very vigilant about that. we are targets and we need to understand it. cyber warfare is a vulnerability in my view of the united states. i don't know. i'm not an expert in that. i don't know to what extent we are in a position to defend against cyber warfare. i think -- i think it is important for us to remember that throughout recent history our alliances have helped the united states, and you look at the united states and china, we have a web of alliances out there around the world whether it's in asia ore europe or where it might be of people that will help share the burden with the freedom-loving countries. that's the strength of ours. we need to make sure that we keep those strong. how we relate to the arab spring is important. that is a really big thing that's happening out there.

again, we don't know what the final result is that's going to be. i'll tell you this, if the israeli-egyptian peace treaty blows up you can forget about an israeli palestinian deal will happen and we don't know who will run egypt. it is still very much up in the air and we don't understand what will end up happening in libya, whether it will be a civil war or something else. syria is a terrible problem now. but as far as the threat of terrorism, it didn't just come from afghanistan. somalia, yayman and other places like that. >> last question, and i thank whoever submitted this, why didn't you ever run for president? we think you would have been a great one. [ applause ] >> i thought about it.

my time would have been 1996 and in the years just before that i had done two stints as chief of staff of the white house for two different presidents. i'd been secretary of the treasury for four years, secretary of state for four years, and i had worked on or led at a fairly high level five campaigns for president by three republican presidents and i was dead tired. pete knows how tired i was. i was dead tired. my wife and i talked about it. i think we could have raised the money, but i was 66 years old, too, at that time and we didn't have it in us, and it was -- i've never looked back on that decision. it was the right decision, and i'm very happy with it, but i'm particularly happy to be back here in grand rapids to stand up for somebody that i will always admire and honor, jerry ford. thank you all very much. [ applause ]

this weekend on american history tv harvard professor john stauffer on the civil war and the move to end slavery. >> one of the aspects of abolition or the abolitionists is when lincoln gives his inaugural the self-described miolitionists are still a rity, a tiny minority and they're still what transforms abolitionists into respected, prescient critics? >> lectures in history tonight at 8:00 eastern. also, more on the series of key political figures who ran for president and lost, but changed

political history. "the contenders" and a look at eugene debs five-time candidate for president. american history tv this weekend on c-span3. this weekend on "after words," katie details "fast and furious." this was something that was swept under the rug and kept from the american people and the mexican people as well. there are hundreds of faceless, innocent mexican citizens that have been murdered as a result of this, but the only thing that we knew outside of the government program was that guns from american gun dealers were going into mexico and causing all these problems with the cartel when really, the government was sanctioning these sales and sending them into mexico. >> she's interviewed by white house correspondent major garrett sunday night at 9:00 part of book tv this weekend on c-span2. >> "history