salute that flag and sing our national anthem those two have come together in history during the war of 1812. so hopefully when you come to visit the smithsonian or you come to see this exhibition, you get a broader understanding of our national history. and the flag that inspired our national anthem. >> you can watch this or other american artifacts programs anytime by visiting our website, www.c-span.org/history, >> in the last of a five-part look at hollywood directors who made films for the u.s. government during world war ii, , in a filmhn houston

depicting the 1943 battle that destroyed that town of san the film was composed almost entirely of reenacted scenes. before showing the film, we spoke with a film historian. >> the book is entitled, five came back. joining us from new york is mark harris. as we look at some of the leading directors from this time period including john houston. pietro was shot by john houston in italy and was intended to be commissioned by frank capra of the successful u.s. effort to free a small, ancient italian village. capra told houston to go to italy in search of a town that could provide images of things like joyful and grateful

villagers emerging from their rounds ofces with cheese and loaves of bread to greet the victorious americans. houston got to italy and found the wrightstown -- the right to wn but the battle was already over. there were no villagers insight. the town was still lined with german traps. , with the full knowledge and enthusiastic cooperation of the army, to re-stage the battle. the battle of san pietro is fake. it is all reenacted in don on that location and with actual u.s. soldiers. none of it israel. it was very successfully passed off to the american public as predominantly actual battle footage. the army put out press releases saying, these men were so brave

that they preceded the army on the front so that they could turn around and film the approaching, which is whatay you always know -- eventeresting is that though this was a fake, only a minute or two of it is real footage, it also helped them create a new visual vocabulary for what battlefield realism looks like. the moviedn't take because he wanted to put something over. he faked the movie because it was the only way he knew how to convey what he understood of ground combat and ground troops.

even though what you are watching isn't real, what houston is going for is in fact a kind of realism. it turned out to be a kind of realism that was very influential on many filmmakers after the war in terms of creating an understanding of how to shoot battle footage that look like real battle footage. >> that is the broad shape of the battle at san pietro, the first of many battles. it was a very costly battle. after the battle, the 143rd infantry regiment alone required 1100 replacements.

the lives lost were precious lives. to their country, to their loved ones, and to the men themselves. >> you are watching american history tv. onhours of programming american history every weekend on c-span 3. follow us on twitter for information on our schedule, upcoming programs and to keep up with the latest history news. next, how do presidents make important decisions, whether it is filing cabinet officials are going to war? we will hear about their decision-making process from former chiefs of staff and advisers to president ronald reagan, bill clinton, george w.

bush and barack obama. the panelists also detailed their relationships with the presidents they served. the panetta institute hosted this hour and 45 minute event. former secretary of defense leon panetta moderated the discussion. >> thank you. [applause] thank you very much, and i welcome all of you to the final forum of our lecture series this year. i think, as you all know, we are looking at 100 years since world war i, 2014 to 1914, an awful lot of history. and to analyze the changes that have been made, we have looked at war and peace and the changes in that arena. we have looked at the role of government, and we have also looked at the issue of freedom versus security. tonight, we are going to take a look at the president of the united states and how presidents

make decisions, and residents, frankly, influence all of those other areas that we just talked about. the president of the united states has today assumed incredible responsibilities and facing incredible pressures in that position. since 1914, we have had 17 presidents of the united states, all of whom, you know, will have various places in history. we have gone from wilson to harding, truman to eisenhower and nixon, kennedy to carter and reagan, johnson to clinton, bush, and obama. what can we learn from all of those presidents? and how has the presidency changed in terms of the responsibilities that have to be confronted? we will look at the challenges

of the modern presidency through the eyes of four top aides, all of whom who have served presidents of the united states, and we are looking at presidents that each of these individuals served. what was their greatest strength, and what was their greatest weakness? and how do you think history is going to look at them? we're talking about president reagan, president clinton, president bush, and president obama. >> thank you very much. leave it to leon and sylvia to put together an alphabet panel. [laughter]

david axelrod, a, etc. [applause] and p for panetta. it is an absolute thrill and a joy to be here in monterey and with leon and sylvia and with all of you. ronald reagan's greatest strength. he knew why he ran for the presidency, and he knew what he would do once he was president. he would focus the country and the world on the united states rebuilding its economy and creating respect for america around the world. cutting the rate of spending increase, cutting taxes, rebuilding our national

security, building up, and finding over burdensome regulations to eliminate. he stayed focused all eight years to those priorities. he was able to put in practice, along with the private sector, obviously, 18 million new jobs in an economy that he inherited that with double digit inflation, double digit interest rates, and america was, as jimmy carter said, suffering malaise. at the end of the carter administration, most people suggested that the presidency might be too big in this modern era for any one person. they stopped saying that with ronald reagan and for all of the presidents who served thereafter.

ronald reagan also understood that he was elected not just to make statements but, in fact, to govern and get things done. he knew that in order to forge consensus in washington, he needed to build consensus throughout america, and that would put pressure on washington. he understood the governing. well, let me put it this way. tip o'neill, the venerable speaker of the house, used to say, i don't like compromising with ronald reagan, because every time i compromise with him, reagan gets 80% of what he wants. [laughter] and ronald reagan would say to us, "well, i'll take 80% anytime and come back the next year for the additional 20%."

that is what governing was all about. that was a hallmark. all right, what was his weakness? his weakness was he had a tendency to trust everybody, and that is why nancy and i were the verifiers. but he trusted everyone until proven otherwise, and sometimes things just did not add up. >> president clinton? >> only one reason that leon asked me to come out here. he called me up, and he said, "we are having this panel, and i want you to talk about bill clinton," and i said, "but, leon, you know everything about bill clinton." and he said, "that is why i want you to talk, so you will get the phone calls."

i love leon panetta. you guys are lucky to have him. [applause] everything i know, anything i say, you can blame it on him, because he taught me it all. greatest strength. for me, president clinton's greatest strength was his intellectual curiosity. and his absolute ability to do the homework it takes to understand a problem from all angles and his willingness to accept advice from people of all walks of life. you know, we could walk into the oval office and give them a piece of advice, and we could say red, yellow, and green, and he would see orange, and then he would say wow.

he could take a problem of no matter what magnitude, and he could distill it down into some facts that he could communicate it so that anybody could understand it, and that is a unique skill. we could have nobel scientists in any subject coming in two weeks from now, and we could not get him to hit a lick at a snake for the first 13 days. we would not do anything, but on that 14th day, you would see books from the white house library stacked up this high on his desk, and he reads like that old evelyn woods reading course. i do not know how many of you remember that, but so quick that you cannot believe he can retain it, and then he would call people on the periphery of the subject, and you would look at his phone logs that night, and he will have talked with people

you just couldn't believe. [laughter] but people would come in -- for the first 45 minutes, he just listened to them, but the last 15 minutes, he would say something so profound that it would make you so proud that you could not stand it, and it was that intellectual curiosity and willingness to do his homework and to listen to people on all sides of the subject before he made a decision. >> and the weakness? [laughter] >> a one-word answer. >> yes. >> history speaks to that. >> andy, president bush? >> george w. bush was a man of

conviction. he was very grounded. he was also very deliberate and disciplined. he was also very courageous, and he had the courage to make a decision, and i would say his flaws were that he allow there to be a myth that he could not read or did not read when he was a very well read and took time to read while he was president, and it was usually relevant to the responsibilities he had, but he also kind of prefer to be from west texas when he really was well educated at yale, and so he allow there to be a perception that he was not as engaged as he was, in fact, but i think the great strength and current to make a decision, not to allow politics to drive a decision, but to allow conscience, character, and what he thought was right for the country to give definition to the decisions he had to make, and they were impossibly difficult decisions.

>> first of all, let me say a word about leon, as well, because i had the opportunity to serve with him, and he is really the embodiment of public service, so he is the perfect guy to be running and if you like this. -- running and institute like this. congressman, budget director, cia director, chief of staff, secretary of the defense, and it makes you wonder, why can't you hold a job? [laughter] but i am a director at the university of chicago department, and it is very much the same, our goals, which is to try to inspire young men and women to go into public service, and you are a great exemplar for that, so thank you for that. [applause] i also see there are an awful lot of young servicemen and women in the audience tonight, and i want to thank you, as well, again as you inspire us. [applause]

listening to erskine talk, his intellectual curiosity was very familiar to me, because i have that same feeling about president obama. i have never sat in a meeting where i felt that he was overmatched or unprepared, and he was as stimulated by the whole array of issues that come before a president as anybody i could imagine, but i would say -- i was going to say that his strengths were that he is incredibly bright, thoughtful, and deliberative and makes deliberative decisions, but i really think given the history of the moment in which he has served, the quality that i most admire about him was that he was willing and has been willing to make decisions that are in the best interest of the country, despite very, very negative

politics at a time when we absolutely had to make those decisions, and i think the american people tend to find leaders at the right times to make those kinds of decisions, and he made those, and we went through some terrible crises, and i always felt good to be at his side, because i felt he would get to the right answer regardless of the politics, and i was mostly the guy telling in the politics, and i was almost always ignored, and i admire him for that. i said earlier what i liked about him best was that he listened to me so little, but i believe that everyone's strings is also often their weakness, and so i think that the criticism of the president is the same, that he is deliberative, that he is thoughtful, that he is not spontaneous enough in his decision-making.

i think it is a good trade-off, but i would say that that is the criticism you most often here. >> you have all mentioned crises, and in many ways, a president is really tested by crisis, and what i would like to do is have you reflect on what was the worst crisis that you saw a president have to handle during the time that you were there, and how did he handle it? how will history speak to that? erskine, let's start with you. >> i think i will go international. [laughter] >> you know, i do not know how many of you can think that, but this was before osama bin laden was well-known, in this country,

at least, and we had a chance to get him in afghanistan once, but to do that, we had to launch missiles and send them over pakistan, with whom we had a shaky relationship, at best, and since there was that shaky relationship, we did not want to alert them too early so that the information we had would leak out, so we sent the vice admiral at the air force academy to have dinner with the president of pakistan, and he told him exactly three seconds before the missiles crossed pakistan, and when those missiles landed, we missed bin laden by, literally, minutes, and the reason i always looked at that as a decision

that took some real guts is we knew that the chances were 50%/50% that we would get him. two, we ran a real chance of disrupting the relationships with a very important country that we were having to deal with, and three, this was during the time of the monica crisis, and we also knew that if we were unsuccessful that the republican house and senate would accuse us of trying to divert people's attention, and as you know, there was a movie out there called "wag the dog," and he never hesitated a second. >> well, i am glad we were able to finish the job. [laughter] [applause] andy? crisis.

>> first of all, a president comes to office focused on what they talked about as they were campaigning to be president, and then reality sets in when they take the oath of office, and the truth is, when they take the oath of office, they probably think more about their inaugural address than the oath they took, but after the address is over, then the burdens of the job dark to show up, and president bush had significant burdens that showed up. the chinese forcing a plane down, and how was he going to react? what was going to happen? not a crisis. but it could have been. he was restrained and was seeking counsel and making phone calls, and the chinese were very slow to answer him, but then you have other crises that come -- i do not want to say you never anticipate them.

they are usually storms, and probably the greatest crisis that caused the greatest concern for the president was hurricane katrina, and the frustration with that crisis was the president alone does not dictate the response, and there are laws that the federal emergency management agency must find a request from a governor to offer support, and that request has to follow a specific protocol that congress outlines, and we had a hard time getting one governor to make the right response or the right question or ask for the right information, and yet the public only sees the president's response. they do not appreciate the governor's response, so that was frustrating. probably the greatest crisis that any president faces, and i pray that president don't have to face this crisis, but too many do, how do you meet your

constitutional responsibilities on a policy you did not invite, but it reads wires the president to keep that oath that he cannot keep without the fine men and women who take other oath to keep his oath and call them into service? and that is going to war, and any time a young man or a young woman is put into harms way, and they are invited to make sacrifices that the president would never invite on anyone, it is a burden the president takes, and going to war is always a crisis. and that weighs heavily on the president, and i watched it weigh very heavily on president george w. bush, and i watched it weigh heavily on his dad, as well, so i would say that is the crisis, one that the law does not allow you to respond the way you would like to, a hurricane, and another one is the constitution says you have the sole responsibility to respond, but you cannot do it yourself, you have to count on other people to make sacrifices, and that word and ends up being the burden.

>> well, since bin laden is taken -- the truth is, for better or worse, there are a lot of crises to choose from under this presidency, and it is not over yet, but on december 16, 2008, we got together with the president-elect and the vice president elect, just a few weeks after we celebrated in grant park for the first time with his economic team together, and they gave us a briefing on the state of the economy, and christina romer, who was going to be with the council of economic advisers, spoke first. she was an expert on the great depression, and she went through all of her charts, and at the end, she said, "mr. president, i think we're in the midst of a recession that is going to be unlike anything we have seen since the great depression," and they talked about the $2

trillion, millions of jobs lost, and timothy geithner spoke, the treasury secretary incoming, and he said, "the banking system is locked up, and it could collapse. no loans are being given," and then peter orszag, the incoming budget director said, "this will add to the deficit," so at this point in time, the president entertained them and dismissed a recount. [laughter] and we basically became a triage unit trying to right the economy, and it shrunk by 8.9%, and we were losing 800,000 jobs per month. the stock market was heading to

6500, and we had millions of foreclosures, and it was the worst situation any president has faced since roosevelt in 1933, and what followed was a recovery act, a large spending program at a time when people were concerned about deficits but necessary to plug the hole in the economy. we had to take steps to stand up to the financial industry, which was reviled at the time for the role it played were perceived to have played in the financial crisis and the train wreck of the economy, and the u.s. auto industry was on the brink, and chrysler and gm were weeks away from bankruptcy, and so you at all of those things, and we had to step in and save them, and none of these steps were positive.

they were all difficult, but it is what his responsibility required, and he took them, and he took them with eyes open, knowing that the politics was bad, and he never asked about the politics or allowed us to put the politics on him, because this is what he was elected to do. >> president ronald reagan. >> as much as reagan became beloved during the campaign in 1980, i think the country really fell in love with him when they saw the grace and dignity and humor after the assassination attempt, which is clearly a major first crisis for the administration. who can forget president reagan as he was being wheeled in on the gurney to gw hospital saying, "i hope all of you doctors are republicans."

[laughter] the other part of the story is that the surgeon leaned down and said, "today, we are all republicans," or what he said to nancy, "honey, if forgot to duck." another crisis is when we lost the challenger, and ronald reagan became the chaplain to the country in that address, comforting america on the loss of those wonderful astronauts, and then there was where ronald reagan was accused of walking away from a deal, a strategic arms negotiation, with mikael gorbachev because he would have to sacrifices sdi, strategic defense initiative, which he thought would keep more pressure on the soviet union.

he was criticized, but ultimately, it got gorbachev back to the table. the next one that i want to mention quickly, everybody knows the signature line of the reagan years. his visit to the berlin wall. but let me suggest to you that it wasn't that easy. the state department and the national security folks all opposed that one paragraph in that speech, because they thought it would undercut gorbachev's efforts with peristrokia and glasnost, and he asked me, and i said, "you are

president. you get to decide." and then he said, "i think we will leave it in," and i explained the objections of the others, and ronald reagan said, "no, this will help and put him even more strongly towards bargaining and negotiating." we went to berlin. the night before, there had been massive riot against the united states because we had put pershing two missiles in germany and elsewhere.

george shultz called me on the phone and said, "will you tell the president that i share my department's objection to that speech, to the paragraph in that speech, and i hope you will convey my views to the president?" and as everyone on this panel knows, when a cabinet secretary does not ask for 10 minutes of the president calendar but asked you to convey the information, it means i have covered myself with the bureaucracy. [laughter] and if the line fails, and it is a major world crises, it is on your shoulders. we have all had that. president reagan and i were driving to the brandenburg gate in the presidential motorcade. he was reviewing his speech one more time, and he got to that paragraph, and he turned to me and said, "it is going to drive the state department boys crazy, but i am going to leave it in."

"mr gorbachev, tear down this wall." ronald reagan basically ended the cold war and brought gorbachev to the table so we got a negotiation. [applause] >> since i was a chief of staff, i will give you a small element. i just got appointed chief of staff, and i was at home, and i think this is about 2:00, 2:30 in the morning, and i got a call from the secret service, and the secret service said, "mr. panetta" -- you know when you get a call at that time of the evening, it is not good news, so, "mr. panetta, i hate to tell you, but a plane just went into the white house." and i said, "what was it? was it a 747?"

and they said, "no, it was a light plane, and i think it may have damaged the jackson magnolia tree," and i said, "wait a minute. this could be a terrorist attack on the president. were there explosives in the plane?" and the answer was, "well, according to cnn news" -- [laughter] and i said, "no, i would appreciate it if you would get off your butt and go out there check it out." >> if it makes you feel good, there is a great story that colin powell tells, being at a church with the national security advisor, and an aide comes during the service, this ceremony, and says, "there is an urgent phone call for you," and, boy, everybody's eyes follow the national security council

director as he leaves the church, and he comes back 10 minutes later, and alma powel says, "what is going on?" and he says, "there has been a coup in x country," and she says, "oh, i heard that on cnn already." [laughter] >> what makes the presidency what it is is that every single day is filled with -- i guarantee you, when we were running for president, we didn't talk a lot about pirates. that was something that came up later. all of the sudden, you know, the president has 10 minutes to decide whether or not he should give the order to try to take out captain phillips' captors,

and he had snipers bobbing on a boat, and thought pretty sure they could get them, but they could have gotten captain phillips, or like when you're dealing with a financial crisis or a war, and they tell you we might have been h1n1 pandemic, that is the nature of the presidency, and that is why it is such an incredibly challenging job. >> andy, let me ask you about that. what is the process the president uses to come to a decision? we have heard a little of it discussed here, but presidents have to face down list issues, on legislative issues, as commander in chief on foreign policy, political decisions, etc., etc. what is the process that the president uses in order to come to a decision? the perceptions are these.

reagan kind of had this belief that was talked about, and clinton reached out to review, and bush we got operated by his gut or a law professor's approach from obama. what was the process you saw the president use? >> first, i want to say it is up to the chief of staff to know the president's personality, like what their thinking process is, and you want to make sure, in my opinion, i wanted to make sure the president was never making a decision when he was hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. [laughter] and since that is 24 hours a day, that is a burden. i also wanted him to make a decision in the best possible mood could be in. i did not want a pessimistic president making a decision. i wanted it to be an optimistic decision. so i focused on the president's lifestyle, and that is a 24/7 item.

i did focus on every minute of every day, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and try to make sure the president could be as prepared as possible when we did not know what he had to be prepared to do. but, ultimately, the president would try not to allow emotion to drive the response. he would seek counsel that was not monolithic, so i would make sure he was not getting monolithic council. he was getting information to be able to make a decision rather than be presented a decision, and i wanted to make sure he understood when the decision was necessary, whether it was in 10 minutes or two hours or six days or three months, and to give the president opportunity then to adjust the process he had to go through to make a decision in

time, because if you make the decision till late, it is irrelevant. if you make it too early, it may not be mature at the time it is put in. so it is like goldilocks and the three bears, always looking for the perfect porridge to feed him, but i think ultimately, the president had to be comforted that he had the information, the best information available at the time from people he could trust, who were not just feeding him a response, and he had to understand the constraints that were there. what are the consequences of the decision being made to our early or too late, and what are the consequences for the decision if it is wrong, so that is the process that i would go through,

what probably whispering into the president here on 9/11 is the best example of delivering messages that the president and expect to hear. when i told him a second plane hit the second tower, america was under attack, it was not a statement he expected to hear from his chief of staff, sitting in front of second grade students with an audience of a press pool watching every move, and i couldn't present in the information and asks to have a discussion or enter into a dialogue, so i had to give him the message and back off and let him wrestle with it, but i try to give him all of the tools in the other room, where the staff was getting ready to help the president do his job. >> erskine? >> people asked me all of the time, was this tv show "the west wing" accurate? it does a good job capturing the velocity, and it is faster than the dotcom world, and the issues

you have to deal with, and an average day for leon, whether we do with bosnia, northern ireland, taxes, and then we would have lunch. [laughter] and we always did, thank god it is friday, only two more workdays until monday. [laughter] and if you were doing one of these sunday shows, all of a sudden on saturday, what you did then you had to do on sunday, so it really was a seven day a week job, but i think what this guy did when he came in was a great job. leon came in and brought in two deputies, and when we arrived, we saw a white house where every 15 minutes of every day was

scheduled. you can imagine in a world that is changing and evolving as much as the one these guys describe. clearly, if you have every 15 minutes scheduled, it gives you no time to think, reflect, and react to a changing world, and it also means that you are going to appear to be late to meeting after meeting after meeting, when it is really work. the second thing that leon and i saw was that we had some members of the staff, and i know this will come as a great surprise to you guys, who leads what was going on in various meetings, meetings they were not even in, and one of the issues of that was to lock the president into where they wanted him to go as opposed to where he might want to go, and therefore if he actually made the opposite decision, it would look like he flip-flopped, and finally, we found a white house where people would wander into the oval office, and the president would get a little information here, a little information there, and it would take them longer to make

worse decisions, and so leon changed that. he made sure the president got all of his information into context, it and he freed up three to four hours every single day to think or reflect on the changing world, and we made sure in theory that less is often better than more, that instead of doing two to three events a day and therefore stepping on the message he was trying to get out, that he would do maybe two a week, and if he was saying something in new york that was quite important, but instead of having bob rice and bob rubin saying the exact opposite thing, they all said the same thing, and that way we were able to get control.

we were able to establish discipline, some organizational structure and focus, and the president went on to have a successful second year. >> erskine reminds me of "west wing," and i had the pleasure of being a consultant for the storyline for three years. the first time i went out to hollywood, i met with seven writers, none of whom was more than 35 years of age. and only two of the seven had ever been in washington, and i spent several hours as we started to chart out the year, and at the end, i said i had to go back to washington, and this wonderful, very pretty, young writer, woman, got up and gave me a hug, and one of the male writers said, "do you know how envious you are making me? she has never kissed a republican in her life." [laughter]

everybody walks into the oval office, almost everyone, and gets cotton in their mouth, telling the president what he wants to know. our job was to be the reality therapist, saying, "it doesn't add up." everybody walks into the oval office, almost everybody, and says, you know, mr. president, it is in your best interest to do this, and our job was to figure out why it was in their best interest first, and the president's second. ronald reagan was a voracious reader. he read all of the memos. all of the decision memos we all talked about. but the key to reagan was listening to the arguments in person. as an actor, he looked at people's eyes and heard their

tone, and he could start sorting out what really added up, and he never liked the argument, mr. president, this is the best politics for you. he would end the conversation. the answer was make sure at our level that he had the right options and let them argue it out with the oval office, and then later he would make a decision. >> david? >> well, i think, and some of it

has to do with the input, right? so there is so much information, and part of the staff job is to filter the information but filter it fairly so he gets a feel for the sweep of arguments, and obama, one of the things that has been very good for him in the presidency is that he had been a legislator for 11 years before he became president, so he was either in springfield or washington. this was the first time in his life he was actually living with his family on a regular basis, so he would go home every night at 6:30 and have dinner with his family, and then he would die into a thick folder, well into the night, reviewing all of the things for the next day, and he was always well briefed on what was in that package. as ken suggested, and, leon, you're asking a question you know the answer to, because you were involved in a lot of this, and this is in a sense that he drills down. he was very well aware of the

implications of the decisions, and he wanted to have people argue them out, and as you know, whoever was in the room, he presumed they were there for a reason, and he wanted to know what everybody thought. he did not want just one dominant voice to speak. and then you'd make a decision. >> again, he asked for my own insights, when we were looking at the bin laden decision, and it was considered a pretty risky operation. and others said this was too risky and that we should not do it. if i am facing a tough decision, ask a citizen, what would you do

if you knew what i did, and i thought if i told the average citizen that we had the best intelligence and location of bin laden, then i think they would say you could not make the mistake of not taking this on, and i told the president that, and i also said i had tremendous confidence in the ability of the seals, and the president did not make a decision then, but the next day, he called, and he said, "it is a go." let me ask. you are all members of presidents who were elected to a second term, and a second term, frankly, turns out to be pretty rough. it is a bumpy ride. things catch up to you. you know, in the last four

years, that you did not have to worry about in the first of four your years. for reagan, iran-contra, for clinton, lewinsky, bush, katrina, obama, veterans care, etc. everybody bumming out, leon. [laughter] >> how does a president stay relevant in the second term? and not seem like, you know, things are not going to happen without the president directing policy? how does the president stay relevant? >> first of all, let me say that i think the president today has an even more difficult task because of the pace at which the media churns, and it is so easy to be overexposed because of the way the media churns, and people get tired.

we live in a society where people are always looking for the new, and they get tired, and in six years, you have to deal with that element, and then we have a few polarizations at we have today, and so it is difficult for any president, for this president, but on the question of relevance, i think this is a serendipitous thing to talk about. the president signed an order today on emissions from a coal-fired plant, and that is pretty profound in its implications, and i am sure it will be pretty controversial, as well, but no one can argue that it was not a meaningful act or gesture. it was a very important one, and i think it will go down in sort of the annals of this discussion as a step forward. so i think you have to use the

tools that are available to you to advance the things that you feel are important, but the other element, by the way, and this is a failing of our political system, we now have a permanent election campaign. we have elections within a few weeks of governing as an interlude, and then more elections, and so part of what happens is people get bored, because this president is not going to be running anymore, so they are already thinking about, and you may have something about it, what about the next presidential election? this guy is the next big news, so that is something else, you know, in this environment in which we are constantly churning. it makes it hard for a second-term president. >> the second term is always a challenge. george w. bush had a challenge of trying to get some of his favorite programs past. he called for social security

reform, and there was immigration reform, and he was not able to build momentum. obviously, he was dealing with two wars, and he was trying to manage this. we were trying to win the peace, so those were challenges, but then you had the crisis in our economy that hit after the republican and democratic conventions, after the two nominees of the major parties had already been selected, and we had an economic crisis, and he had to deal with that, so he did not have a lot of positive momentum going to get anything done with congress, or to mobilize support with the american people. he was trying to clean up two wars, help secure peace in two places that did not want to embrace peace, and then he had an economic crisis that very few people anticipated would calm. so i think what he did do was manage with a calm deliverance,

and he was a partner in a transition. and, yes, president george w. bush and barack obama had very different philosophies, obviously different parties, and he was not given an empty basket to play with. so he focused on the transition. and he started to do that quite early, and it was probably the most orderly transition. >> i will always be profoundly grateful and they were briefing us in terms of their jobs and bring us up-to-date on things that were relevant for us moving forward, so i was proud. i was proud of our country because of the way that

transition was handled, because frankly, we had been the jesus out of them in our campaign. we were very critical of the policies, and it said something about our country that despite all of that -- now, we did work together on something important. you mentioned the financial crisis. after lehman collapsed, hank paulson, the treasury secretary, reached out to brief obama, and obama was as supportive as he could be in terms of rallying them together for that solution and i am going to break all of this comedy with a tease and make one partisan point, which

is democrats, in large numbers, came to the support of president bush, and it was a very tough vote. it was a time of crisis for the country, and i think that was a good example that is worth following. >> my transition is that the second term is about getting ready to pass the baton, and a good president will make sure that the baton is not dropped the day it is passed, not being a lame duck president, getting ready to support a president you may not like what you will respect. >> how do you stay relevant? >> you govern as if it was your first day in office, not your

yes, we had the major hurdle of iran-contra, but before that, we also had tax reform with marty russo, and one of the most fundamental tax bill is in american history, and it took place in the second term. so did immigration reform. so did welfare reform, social security, and social security reform all were the first 2.5 years of the second term. but after iran-contra, and the president fired don regan, he did it because he needed new blood and fresh ideas, and the credibility of colin powell and baker and myself, not just at managers, but somebody who could figure out a strategy who could make those last years important. when i came back to the white

house, it was that ronald reagan was not a lame duck. he was a dead duck. why? because he had just lost the united states senate for the last years of his term. ronald reagan went out of his way to rebuild the presidency so that we did the u.s. free trade agreement. in hindsight, it looks easy, except jim baker, my wonderful predecessor and secretary of the treasury, could not push it over the line. it took the president to do it. the president had built up a trusting relationship with the congress on both sides of the aisle, so he was able to re-create the coalition. he did the strategic arms negotiation with gorbachev with the two summit meetings and the

treaty. we got a supreme court nominee, anthony kennedy, approved overwhelmingly by a democratic senate, and i know this is going to sound weird, but we had all 13 appropriation bills passed on time. not bad for a b-movie actor. [laughter] [applause]