by board security and national policy under these models. i would argue that the effect is different when you are here than when you are a foreign correspondent abroad during yampa let me make a few overall observations. the first is that you should take what you hear from me and discount it by the fact that "the new york times" is one of the very few you have heard from some today, a federalist job -- fabulous job at usa today and the new york times. jim and barbara would probably agree, we are a dying man out here. there are not that many

newspapers in america that support a very active foreign policy operation, and in fact, there are only a handful of newspapers is still have foreign correspondents. if you do not have foreign correspondents, it means you do not have editors at a foreign desk that are thinking about this each and every day. you don't have a route by which the stories will get in prominent play in the newspapers. instead, what most newspapers in america do is that they take in the washington post news wire or the l.a. times. at this point, only the times, the post, the wall street

journal, and to a lesser degree, the l.a. times, have a very active foreign policy group. i am not sure if i left anybody else. then of course you have the wire services and a whole new world of rising journalism that has happened in many places, but you have very few correspondents on the ground. so the result is that there are news alligators and they are sitting around and blogging in -- news at irrigators and they are sitting around blogging -- .ggregate jurorors the difficulty that the internet has given us is that we have had this huge explosion of opinions , and is resting on an ever narrowing column of facts that comes from having reporters out

on the ground and reporting. i am pleased to say the times actually has more foreign correspondents than it did when i was a foreign correspondent 15 years ago. we have expanded and invested in this but it is because this is very much our bread and butter. it is the reason that people around the world go in and get "the new york times." the business model that works for us cannot work for that many other news organizations. take everything i am about to give you an discounted by the fact that "the new york times" is hardly a typical news organization for these purposes. to what degree do policy-makers not only use these kinds of schools of thought, but do journalists refer back to the schools of thought as they go and do their reporting?

the answer to the question is, we think about these differences all the time, and write about them, because when people pick up their new york times in the morning, they do not necessarily want to feel like -- they want to feel as if they are getting analysis. they want to walk away from a good piece feeling as if they got smarter, but they do not necessarily want to feel as if to do that they had to study individual schools of thought and tried to formulate this in a way that we might in an academic world go about doing this. henry mentioned i am and add

john that the 10 at -- at the kennedy school, and frequently i will get asked by my students, when you wrote this story in the weekly review, you did not lay out these three different schools or three different approaches. to which my answer is, you bet i do. i actually want people to turn the page. you have to be able to find a way to give them the substance of it without necessarily giving them the labels that go around it. what is true for the reader is, and for this i would make tom the exception to the rule in the days when he was in government and we would talk. what is true for the reader is by and large true for policymakers. i have asked the question of the national security adviser or the secretary of state. this decision that you just

made, would you say it is a realist approach or whatever? you get a couple of different reaction. the first reaction is, we did not label it right. secondly, if i say that it does not fit any, and i stare blankly, sanger will think i am a big it and will go out and ride that. so i have to make up something. thirdly, the fact of the matter is that most do not fit neatly into one of these categories and i will come up with an example of that in just a moment about libya. you want to show that you are being influenza and understood

these, and in order to demonstrate your additional brilliance, show how you blended elements of each of them, even if they are completely self contradictory. that is the game one place when one is being interviewed here. there are enough of you in the room who have gone through this process that i suspect you probably recognize that brief moment. when you look at decisions that are being made in the bush and administration and the obama administration, you find the second corollary to this. in the bush administration, there were heavy on doctrine in the first term. go out and read the first bush national security strategy. that is the one that laid out the concept that the united states view get as within its rights to step out and take unilateral action against a

country developing weapons of mass destruction that could be harmful to american national interest. they did so in exactly one case. remember in the axis of evil, there were three countries name, north korea, iraq, and iran, and managed to strike the only one that had no active weapons of mass destruction program. the other two had pretty active once and did not get struck. it led to one of the great pieces of fun that barbara and i and others would have in dealing with the bush white house, which would be, here is your ideological document. here is your problem. tell me how these to talk to each other. by the second term, that pretty well abandon any effort to try to do that other than explaining a big loophole in the national security strategy in the first term was that we are supposed to use good judgment about it come the

second term. fact president bush admitted to me at one point that he could not even discuss iran's nuclear program in public because people would say to him, sure their work weapons of mass destruction in iraq. he said he would discuss it in private with other national leaders and develop strategies, but could not do it in the public discussion. so there was a doctrine heavy administration to which you could fit very easily into some of the categories you laid out today. if you went and examined their second term behavior, the doctrine would not be at all predictive of the behavior. passport to the obama administration. as the arab spring has come, we have discovered that no doctrine

doctrine, which is that the administration has gone out of its way, having taken the time last year to draft its own national security strategy, to explain that in the arab spring case, we had some basic principles, universal values, which by the way, if you want a fun evening drinking game, try to get somebody in the administration to actually defined what are universal values. make sure they are doing the buying every time they name one because they will say it is not always universal. the next eight and is, because our interests are different in each and every location, that does not mean that we apply the same behavior to each country, because every culture, but points of leverage or different. this is how they explain the concept by which you run daily

nato bombing raids over libya, but when saudi arabia comes in to a sovereign state like bahrain and begins to occupy and put down rebellions, you quietly asked them if they would get interested in summer form. obviously our interest between bahrain and libya are quite different. libya is useful because in this situation room debate that took place on the afternoon of march 15, you actually briefly got a flicker of least two of the schools of thought that you have dr. year-to-date. bob gates was out with what you would call the realist school there. we have no vital national interest in libya, therefore, let us not get involved even in

no-fly zones, because there is the world of mission creep and you will find yourself doing things inside the country had no intention of doing this afternoon. that is spoken from the experience of iraq. gates has this wonderful phrase , the question least asked in the bush years was "and then what?" on the other side you had a liberal internationalist group use arawn secretary clinton, and they were arguing for a humanitarian intervention because while the realist school was driven by iraq, they were being driven by memories of

rwanda. he often said it was his largest regret in his presidency. to say that this was the biggest is to tell you that it was significant. what you saw president obama do in the end was basically split the difference between those two schools. you saw him authorize an air campaign, but promised that there would be no ground troops and that the united states would be in the lead only for a few days to use it unique capabilities. by a large, they stuck with that at least until a few days ago. that was an effort to try to get the best of the liberal

international group and the best of the realist group, to avoid the pitfalls of the two biggest experiences of the past years, particularly in a country where we did not have a lot of vital national interest. let me go on to talk for just a little bit about the implications of this for reporters and then for u.s. foreign-policy. reporters assume most of the time, rightly or wrongly, that national interest is usually the driving factor. the backup position reporters go to is petty, bureaucratic or political considerations, and

frequently they meet somewhere. the place where they need most often, for example, is when you are writing and reporting about trade. trade is an area where you see the biggest intersection of domestic, political forces and an international conflict. just think about the free trade agreements for colombia or panama or south korea or others. these are trade agreements whose primary purpose is political. in other words, to bolster our relationship with needed allies, but that are argued out by economic grounds in congress. those too frequently come into contact -- into conflict. as international relations are played out day to day, pragmatism most often wins. if you are looking for the evidence of this, just do what i

had to spend my entire fall doing before you all saw them, which is sort through the 250,000 cables in the wikileaks issue. the fabulous technology team that built of custom-made search engine that not only allowed to search by subject matter but floated out the most sensitive documents, the ones that have the longest the classification. , the ones that were being copied to the nsa or whatever. i have learned a few lessons. the first is that the professional diplomats we put on the ground are largely a non ideological bunch. the cables advocating a particular approach for a visiting deputy secretary of state or assistant secretary are extraordinarily pragmatic and

written by local interest. they may well describe what you asked about, which is to try to look at the different schools of thought inside a country and figure out what the competition is and how the united states would come in in support of one or another. foreign correspondents look at the same thing and try to find this seems a long which you would do your reporting. all of the interesting stories and conflicts are usually going to be at the it seems of those schools of thought. from wikileaks we discovered that people are pragmatic. we also discovered two other things. we discover that things are not only under classified, as tom pointed out, but also wildly over classified, as all of us here know. here is my favorite example. you cannot make this stuff up.

every day, every american embassy goes through the clips from every major newspaper in their territory. the embassy in spain goes through the spanish papers, the embassy in china goes to the chinese papers. the cut out the most interesting stuff and assemble it into one document with news stories, opinion pieces, and just before the press the button and send it to washington, some idiot stamps a secret stamp on top of it, and a good third of what we were going through with all of this was local clips from things that had appeared the previous morning in the local press that was now part of the secret archives of the united states of america. your tax payer dollars at work. the second thing we learned of this is that diplomats are a very literary group, or as one

of my favorite editors said, the new americans knew how to write -- hoon new americans knew how to write? the system of these approaches really leaks out at you -- leaps out at you. tells you that if the school of fox are going to get on out that the policy area, more than likely by political times than by professional diplomats. the last couple of things on the questions that henry asked. he said different schools of thought in the u.s. have different expectations of what power.ant in each rise in pac do you pay attention to these as you are writing?

when i was in china in january, i happen to be there on the day that secretary was gate -- secretary gates was they are seeing hu jintao. it was a day that the chinese air force had decided to go fly the stealth fighter for the first time. of course secretary gates asked president hu jintao about it and he stared at him blankly and said "we flew what?" it went all the way down the line until they hit the first guy in uniform who nodded yes and said of course we do. they said we did not mean to do this to embarrass you. i am sure that hu jintao did not know that the stealth fighter was going to beat flight tested the previous week. this gave us an opportunity,

without putting labels on it, to write a fair bit about different interest groups within china and how they see their approaches, how you have a more internationalist group in the leadership, how you had a different element within the chinese military, how that element has gotten a wealthy enough an independent enough from the communist party that nobody felt they had to go call in and get permission to fly the stealth fighter that day. i suspect that had somebody in the chinese military tried that with chairman mao, he would probably be cleaning out the bathroom stalls and cites a military base in the cold as corner of china you confined, but that was no longer necessary. it was a way to illustrate in a

very anecdotal way the beginnings of these different calculations. we similarly do it in china in the description about why the chinese government allows free elections in small communities, were frequently the issues are environmental degradation or corruption, but they do not allow this kind of democracy did take place on a larger scale at a national level. so you do have lots of our tuttis to describe these, also frequently not exactly -- you have lots of opportunities to describe these, although not in the categories were described today. you could have academics reading the story and saying, clearly the author here does not understand the correct schools of thought. which may well be true. or it could be at the altar understood the schools of thought that these events would

fit as well as academics would frequently like them to, because the world is a big and messy place. >> thank you very much. these questions that both, and david have referred to were questions developed by both deepa and me as we were wrestling with questions about ways to test a relevance and the implications of what we have been doing. do you want to make a comment or to and then we can go to a discussion? >> thank you very much, tom and david. as expected, you have both been provocative and challenging as well as giving us some constructive things to think about. let me just say a few things in

response to what you both laid out. i heard tom suggesting that u.s. foreign policy, and this is partly on the u.s. side of it, but we will shift to the rising power side as well. i heard something that was basically fairly ad hoc, opportunistic, changes fairly constantly. the idea is -- i am not anarchic, but very much in a state of flux, with the way foreign policy is made. on the other hand, it seems to me that if we think about what walter said during lunch, if we don't think in terms of pure least schools of thought but rather of narrative that all of

us carry around with us, because we don't obviously react to things in a vacuum. we have certain narrative's that are coming from some notion of how we view the world. therefore, in a very loose fashion, one can begin to suggest that perhaps it is not as chaotic and as talk as might be seen. they would suggest that journalists do think in schools of thought terms. that came as a bit of a surprise, but at least with "the new york times," i can certainly sadist well-informed and well done, so not -- i can certainly say that it is well informed and well done.

i think it goes to what we are talking about, that is what walter raised at lunch, how to increate -- how to create and inform, educate, and nuanced understanding of what is going on. you are not going to put the whole kit and caboodle out there, but you have to have some framework that journalists seem to be carrying around with them. if we were to shift to the other side, that is the rising powers. on the one hand, sitting in the rising powers, they look at the u.s. and they do see a fairly complicated domestic discourse going on about foreign policy. they have to make sense of what we are doing in washington, so they, too, have to come up with

ways of interpreting this. one of the things is that what the u.s. does, and david touched on that, can empower different groups in these rising powers. for example, a case that i know in india, the fact that obama visited in november and gave the kind of promises he gave about the security council with a long way to what i suggested empowers the great power realist, as opposed to the hyper nationalists who very suspicious about the u.s. i think what the debate in the u.s., and the second one is to contain and engage china. given the pivotal position of

china for all of these rising powers, paying very close attention to what the u.s. is saying, which is different things. one question would be, how did these rising powers then either react to that, prepare for what might be u.s. foreign-policy and china, without some sense of the u.s. simply reacting on an ad hoc basis. the question would be, how can we mitigate what might be the fallout of that on the rising powers as they try to fashion their own foreign policy? i can go on and on this, but i want to stop. i just wanted to raise a few questions and issues that i see us having to deal with.

let me then open the floor. barbara? >> it strikes me that there have been various times in u.s. foreign policy where we have talked a lot about schools. certainly under bush, with the iraq invasion, it was all about the neo conservatives in this country. do you see that those types of discussions now are really being muted because obama is no doctrine obama, or do you think this sort of thing might return again with some future president? >> i think it could well return, not only with a future president but actually in the obama presidency. in the first two years, they have wanted to portray themselves very much as

pragmatists. by and large it is one of the least ideological groups i have covered in some time. that is not necessarily mean that you do not see the battles internally between the schools of thought as i laid out in the libya case. what is interesting in libya is that you have seen a marriage of a neocon school and a liberal internationalists school, both of whom wanted the united states to go in to libya, but probably for somewhat different reasons. the liberal internationalist group that argued in the situation room that day had an interest in demonstrating responsibility to protect, a concept that they have nurtured along inside the united nations and beyond for more than a decade now, after bosnia and so forth. the neocon groups on opportunity to impress upon the

obama administration that sometimes you really do need regime change in order to make change work. so they had two very different goals. it was made all the muddier in the obama administration's description of this because the administration explained that the military action was aimed only at the possibility -- responsibility to protect and with only as far as the un authorized, but that it was u.s. policy that it was time for gaddafi to go. you could be a wise guy and say was that the un mission? this particular flight, or did you guys start off in the first 30 minutes making it responsibility to protect, but as you veer toward the gaddafi palace, where suddenly keeking in on some american policy. it is meant to be sarcastic, but

it does get to the point that even within the obama administration, for all it talks about pragmatism, you see the attention of these different schools. the neocons were cheering on the liberal internationalists. it is not every day you get those guys in the same room. >> there is no question at all that professionals are in charge in general, but not across the board. i think if ask enough questions, it could be detected as being a liberal internationalist. i think that is probably true. >> with a heavy realist been here. >> and a willingness to accept realist approach is to the liberal internationalism. i can put it that way. the neocons, in my view, played a role in the bush administration, but as david has

made clear, in the second wish to administration, that evaporated. if one were to take the test of successful neoconism, then john boldin would have ended the un are gotten us out of it or take a whole series of other decisions which never eventuated in the end, even though he espoused them as the process of policy formulation when along. so there was some tampering. a lot of the timbering is obviously what will in effect sell was a general american public? what will sell with the journalistic commentator, one of whom sits to my right and plays a very important role in terms of his analysis of what is saleable or not. the final point on libya, whatever one may think about the differentiation, 10 minutes after the resolution passed, it was clear that the only test of

success is mr gaddafi's disappearance. there is no way to palliate that. there is massive confusion because if we make a deal with mr. gaddafi, then who is protecting the people who are under his control? in a sense, do we have a program or responsibility to meet those kinds of responsibilities? it is like every other foreign policy decision. you can look down the road at the various alternative result, but you cannot play chess three moves ahead very successfully in terms of what you are dealing with when you have this kind of situation with these kinds of contending policy issues before you, and having made that decision to kind of go with what you think is most expedient for the short term, which i suspect was the three woman or what the

problem, as opposed to the neocon get rid of gaddafi. day except it in a sense the responsibility of the first decision but thought the difficulty of the second. >> you could also politically at home cell responsibility to protect to a liberal base that was very important after president obama in a way that you could not sell the regime change side. it raises the question, had president bush made responsibility to protect the iraqi people as an argument for going in, would he have gotten any wider by and for the war? -- buy-in for the war? >> one could make the conclusion that we became a bigger threat to the iraqi

people than almost anything else for a while. there were great difficulties in dealing with that issue. >> the discussion has provided some grudging recognition for the necessity of schools of thought or narratives, whatever we may call them. i want to just clarify that the purpose of it is not to put labels on things. someone once said labels are for cans. on the other hand, you could not easily select food without some sort of labels. the purpose is to understand differences in the united states and in these foreign countries. whether you call them gates coalitions are internationalist are neocons, it doesn't seem to me that it matters that much. we are looking for categories the carry-on individuals.

otherwise our understanding is completely personalized and at heart. -- ad hoc. >> he may have difficulty in some cases stretching beyond individuals or beyond what are essentially policy coalitions of the moment. >> you mentioned as strong spread of realism. it helps to understand repeated differences that come up over almost any issue. i am always amazed at how surprised we are by the

difference between the bands credentials -- defends professionals. >> i spent four years in the situation room. i found no issue on which the uniform military ever proposed a military solution. i found a few in which the liberal internationalist at the state department did. it was interesting because the standard military answer to all such proposals was four divisions, four years. >> we want to know what the mission is and whether we are going to have support beyond tomorrow. >> let go to walter, since he might throw some light on the debate. >> when i started thinking about schools in american foreign policy was when during the cold war, hawks and doves were pretty predictable.

basically you are hawks were always hawks and doves were always those. some people would want to go into a the commies and some would want to be nice to them, and it was all simple. then you get to bosnia and cause a vote and suddenly the old hawk and of coalition started to split. to some degree, those splits have been with us ever since the end of the cold war so that the arguments over libya include old cold war hawks and doves in pretty much the same way that the arguments over bosnia did. that suggested to me that in fact there were some kinds of patterns that were shaping the way different people thought about these. it is not going to help you predict every person and every policy, but you did notice that

the iron filings started to light up -- line up as far as certain polls. it began as just trying to describe the patterns of was seeing, and i think there are fairly persistent. >> i think you are right. watching the hawks and the doves, and my business was usually writing about the droppings as they fly around. it has not gotten a lot more interesting because you are getting more different formations than we did before. in libya, use salt hawks and doves line information together even if they were not in the same room. you saw the real stepping in and

maintaining they were actually the revival of the owls who had been for some really bad experiences over the past 10 years and had emerged with some wisdom about where all of these things in the up --end up. that is why as a journalist is important to know the schools and not get trapped inside them. in day-to-day reporting, it may work with backing off of history, you can look back and see the difference groups coming together. what we are doing is describing the takeoff of these different flocks of birds, their intermingling at various moments, their relationships with each other, and their separation again. it is before you know how all that is going to turn out. sometimes i think there is a desire among many of my academic colleagues to have us write this

stuff as if it is decided history, when it is still very much in flux. >> i can only add to what david said, if you look at thomson's wonderful books and see how it evolves in the book. it ended up as the arms control grew roots in many ways. -- arms control guru in many ways. there is the possibility of shifts and changes over a period of time, and one set of labels has to be carefully examined as things go on. david has pointed out that on some issues you have coalitions. there is value in understanding

this, but what needs to be careful about the predictive possibilities and focus as much on the leading individuals who will plead the case or the cause in the councils of foreign policy, as one does the schools to which they belong. the schools give you an inherent sense of which direction they may lean, but they do not give you what i would call a sovereign, predicted capacity. that is what i worry about. >> in terms of arguments that you might want to take into the room -- >> of course, but you need to be careful to always maneuver so that you hear what the other guy has to say first before you attack his premises without knowing essentially how they are going to open up on that particular question. a little bit of intelligence of that sorgos a long way.

one needs to be a little bit careful about the reasons by which you formulate your foreign policy. if you are formulating it solely to meet the interests of a particular group in country x, then you need to have that foreign policy buttressed by a lot of what i would call better reasons in the councils of government. you have to have a pretty strong national interest case. it cannot be merely because we would like to appeal to this group in country x, and they are sympathetic with this outcome. they will be our allies, but everything else about the policy is wrong. you want to be careful to blend those in. the policy views that when do

not always have the best arguments in their favor. there are sometimes very strong arguments, many of them coming out of the domestic consensus that is formulated elsewhere, often in the white house, that may well be the trump card. >> what i was saying before that one had to be careful in covering these things on a day- to-day scale, last week was a great example. you had john mccain on the ground in libya, declaring that the rebels were his heroes. that was the phrase he used. on the exact same day, you had michele bachmann, who is in the same party as mccain, declaring that they were al qaeda sympathizers and that the united states should be no where near them because they will either be supporting al qaeda or hezbollah.

tell me what i am supposed to think about where the party comes out when you have to leading voices in the party describing our allies, the group we would presumably have come in to support, and radically different terms. >> the continuing debate sometimes results in the center of gravity on the michele bachmann side and sometimes on the mccain side. >> my point is that as a reporter, i cannot predict to you were the party is going to end up on that. >> i would concede that we are not trying to develop a predictive tool. we are trying to find some categories to help us understand the differences.

>> we are finally agreeing with you and we probably need to stop fighting the battle of what we presume you are interested in as opposed to what you have said you are interested in. [laughter] >> this is how we learn. >> we are academics, we are used to this. >> i guess we can agree broadly that it may not always translate into policy. the question i had was, since both of you are looking closely at what the government does, [unintelligible] looking at the schools in a sense as essentially outside the bay -- outside of debate within the government, how much do

these external public policy debates influence the government? how does that process work? [unintelligible] is it that you are afraid to get into the debate outside? >> i would say that to some extent, if the outside debate does two things, it can have a positive influence. if it creates a groundswell of public support for some reason in a particular direction. secondly, at a lesser point, it makes a series of arguments or make suggestions which were rare, they more often come from the think tanks and from what i

call the inner academic world, not the public voice of academia, it makes useful suggestions about how to deal with the problem, though sometimes can be picked up and looked at. often they are the same kinds of things that are circulated in government, and we all know that policy successes have a thousand fathers and 100,000 grandfathers', and failures have only one person to blame. in a sense, it is the dialogue that often goes on inside and outside government that begins to produce the policy responses. to some extent, the public reflection of that is a paler mirror image work out reach, but occasionally you do find people who will advance a new argument in favor of a policy that will have some salience or even come

forward with the kind of genius suggestion that somewhere in the government had not been thought of yet or put together in the same way. >> i agree with all that and just add by example, and again this gets to why one would not use this as a predictive model. i saw the description in your papers of how aei and some other rooms represent schools of thought that would help you understand the bush foreign policy in its early days. that is true, but going into the bush foreign policy, you may recall that you read an awful lot of papers about the need to power. china's there was a huge run-up of that through the 2000 campaign. but the time 9/11 happen and

sights turned toward another issue, which was iraq and all that, suddenly china was needed for many of these things and for keeping north korea in check, and the entire contained china movements that one would have expected to flourish in the early days of the bush administration was completely silenced. it really has not come back until president obama took office. i think these are important and significant but i am not sure they are determined it. it is not clear how much the person running for president embraced these. 10 days before president bush took office, i went down to the ranch for that ritual "new york times" interview that presidents give. we walk around ranch for two or three hours and talked about the world and president-elect bush

described at great length the need to move to a far more humble foreign-policy in which the united states did not feel like it had to be in the lead on every issue. it was probably one of the most articulate expressions of the obama early foreign policy that i had ever heard of. it is just that none of us a that time knew about president obama. it tells you how the schools shifted once the events shifted. >> david, i was taken with your anecdote about the editor saying who knew a journalist could write? i had a similar experience talking to a french writer the other day.

american diplomats were winning plaudits everywhere for their intelligence you of the world and they were feeling left out. >> give him my e-mail address, will you? [laughter] >> i teach a course in u.s. foreign policy making in the gulf and we cover world war ii to the present, and at the and i give my students a final exam which poses the question, was american foreign policy basically reactive, or did somehow constitutes a coherent whole? people scratch their heads and think about that, but many of the students come out with the understanding it was both. basically, it was reactive, and this is a key point, but that

there was a method narrative that underlaid all of it with a sense of interest of where we wanted to go, what our national objectives would be, and in our individual choices of reactions , we chose the one that basically pointed in that direction, and they all fit together in the end. >> i would say that a meta- narrative is reacted as much as a daily flow policy decisions. it is not setting out to ignore what is there. maybe setting out to change. i think the truth is that we are more consumed on an increasing basis with the daily flow of events than we are necessarily

in sitting down and reducing a larger policy focused on major changes, which indeed takes the lead in this situation as opposed to necessarily responding to daily events. getting out of that right is very, very difficult. i think it is a major challenge for the united states as it is to many countries around the world. some have as a result less to do that we do. some have less busy work to do, and some have developed organizational arrangements inside their own bureaucracy that gives them an opportunity to step out of the fascination and responsibilities of the daily flow of events and actually get people to sit and look and say we are in the proverbial deep hole, how do we stop digging? you and i know a number of those, and iran in particular, which we discussed in the last

hour, is very much a victim of reaction policy as opposed to being able to take on the difficulties. some of the primary reasons why it is so hard happen to be domestic questions as much as they are the difficulties of dealing wet iran. -- dealing with iran. >> we are fast approaching the witching hour. >> i had to write this one down. what impact do you think civil society, social media and public diplomacy will have on the existing foreign policy schools? can the public themselves, who

are getting more interested in foreign policy -- people are starting to look into it. can be date -- can they be divided into already existing categories, or is it changing the categories that exist? >> i have a question that is connected to this idea of bayous and -- values and meta- narratives and the connection they have with consistency, and whether or not at different times in american history you

see more inconsistency or hypocrisy connected to them in terms of people taking different or conflicting positions. part of the difficulty i have with this balancing with reactive foreign-policy to the media challenges is the question, to what extent do we take into account different american positioning in the world? we keep talking about the rising powers elsewhere, but there is the reality that the u.s. itself has been position differently within the global order throughout its history. there was a time when the american a semblance was taken for granted. we now live in a situation where domestic policy is very much influenced by the economic bankruptcy of the united states. i want to know the extent to

which that mediates into this discussion about reactive american foreign policy. as american foreign policy become more reactive as the united states faced more domestic problems and more difficult economic challenges at home? >> i leave to david the influence of blogs, public diplomacy and new media. i think in public, one might go back to the isolationist tendency on one hand, which seems to have not died out and in some ways still has some

influence. i think the internationalist tendency still exists in the public, but one could define other schools of the public. some would want to use military force more often than others and some would not want to. i don't know if they comfortably i think isolationism has more or less morphed into something else, maybe something more robust and involved internationally, interestingly enough, but i have not followed it. maltster could probably give us a good answer to that -- walter could probably give us a good answer to that. more to the question of difficulty in managing u.s. policy and the conditions where we have a huge preoccupation with economic recovery, for example. i think it has a huge influence.

i think there are very serious questions of how long we will stay committed to spending $120 billion in afghanistan. there are serious questions about committing ground forces as well as air forces, with the serious discussion of how sure we could make our air commitment in libya, monetary, fiscal questions. i think we are not far from that particular set of issues. there will be a huge impact, there are a has been, on foreign assistance which generally the public continues to believe represents 25% of our budget. it is less than 1%. the internationals should be so lucky. >> just to add on to the point that tom was making here, the

polls i have seen show that yes, people believe is 10%-25% of the budget for 40 -- for foreign assistance, but they also believe that npr gets 40% of the federal budget. a friend of mine at npr said he would settle for half of that and not complain. to the question of whether or not foreign policy has become more reactive, i think the answer to that lies in your question about social media. it has had to become more reactive, first because the news cycle is that up, and then because social media has made it impossible for any administration to stay silent, even about things that stay off tv. in the old days, if you saw battles take place in vietnam on television, we all thought that

affected vietnam decision making. but in rwanda, one of the reasons president clinton did not intervene was because there were no cameras there so the issue was not brought in to american living rooms. before i came over here, in syria, a place where before we almost had no press, we have all been watching videos on youtube taken from people's cell phones. i think that has forced this white house to probably speed up its reactions at a time when they would probably prefer to sort of sit back and think through a little more carefully the very complex issue of how do you deal with president besotted -- president assad? on the broader issue of social networking, we all believe that

social networking helped fuel the era of uprisings that we have seen, and i am sure to some degree that is true, but it is not true universally across the board. people said it had a huge impact in tunisia. the percentage of the population in tunisia that is wired is very, very small. on the other hand, the percentage of the population that is wired in iran is very large, and it is one of the places that so far has stayed largely quiet because of the degree of state control that has been exerted there. so yes, a social media has a very big effect, but again, it is not necessarily a predicted effect. you could have a huge uprising in a place that has a fairly low social media penetration. does it affect the way that the

discussion goes on among americans, and to americans than put themselves into these different categories tex? certainly, it makes it easier for americans to express their views on foreign policy decisions. you turn on the blog, or if you want an easier way to do that, just go to the reader comments on any given "new york times" story. even if you sift out whatever percentage of reactions are enforcing somebody's hobbyhorse, just take a more neutral ones and try to put them in the categories you have described, i think you'll be able to do that. he will find old school, international school, but interventionist school, neocon school. i think you will also find a

huge amount of inconsistency, as you would expect that you might. and that gets to the school we have probably least discussed but the one that tom picked up, which is, what is this going to cost me school? one major inherent to that is the president of the united states. if you go to the end of the december 1st, 2009 afghanistan and pakistan speech, there is a fascinating section that i do not think i could ever recall reading an american president, at least in the post-cold war era of describing, in which he said, this is what we need to go do in afghanistan, but i can tell you, we have many bigger problems at home, so this will be of limited duration because we cannot afford to do this forever. and if you go to the libya

speech he gave in mid-march, describing how the united states would go in at the front and pull back quickly, exactly what we ended up doing, there is a very parallel discussion about how the u.s. cannot get into each and every fight. my guess is that in this domestic political environment, that probably has a very large influence. >> foreign policy is both reactive and proactive. this policy has crystallized the pro-active side, but in many instances, that is very worthwhile. president obama is potentially developing a way of thinking about this the you could not anticipate in terms of reacting to other countries. it is something unique to america.

>> i was in china for a conference in december, and a very prominent chinese economist who is in the government said to me over lunch, you know, we have many predictive models for u.s. behavior for 2000 forward. the one that we never predicted was that you would spend $1 trillion in an area of the world where we did not see that you had critical interest. >> i think i have to now bring the proceedings to a close. if i may take my prerogative as chair to ended on a cautiously optimistic note by noting what is perhaps a grudging acceptance of this tendency, let's say, but also, throughout the day, that shares are invited from the government seemed to find some

utility in the form of this kind of project. i said, i teach a course on international relations with south asia. i have found that master's students often end up in the government from george washington. at the end of the semester, several came up and told me that the single most important thing, the most useful thing to understand the bewildering array of things going on in india was the charts i had given them. so i felt good about that. hopefully, there will be some indirect impact along the way. i want to also say that hopefully all of those involved in the world the project will agree that we have had a terrific day, got in an enormous amount of feedback, suggestions, advice and criticism, all, i think,

extremely -- we will take note of this and hopefully it will help us refine our own thinking and produce a better volume. but also, i cannot leave without a number of people. the center literally give us the entire staff, but the staff at our disposal to make sure -- put to the staff at our disposal to make sure that this went off without a hitch. i want to thank them. he made it all worked out very well. hopefully with a little bit of luck and continued sponsorship, we will continue to have events like this, especially trying to

bring some of the regional voices to washington. please join me in thanking our splendid panelists were continuing to keep us awake after 6:00 p.m. with their provocative comments. thank you. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011]

>> tonight, a look at same-sex marriage in the u.s. we will hear from the political strategist who has helped carry forwards the lawsuit over california's prop. 8. see that tonight on c-span. >> tonight, fcc commissioner on the wireless industry, the expansion to broadband, and the purchase of t mobil by at&t. >> the department of justice concentrates on antitrust oversight. we are responsible, we have a public interest standard which includes looking at competition, how the market looks, how the

existing players in the market will be affected, how consumers will be affected. >> that is tonight on c-span-2. >> tomorrow, virginia governor bob macdonald talks about legislative challenges. he will speak at the manhattan institute tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. eastern. right after that, a discussion on the current challenges facing public broadcasting. we will hear remarks from the pbs president and ceo, as well as national public radio as interim president. that starts at 9:00 a.m. eastern on c-span-2. >> all this month, we have been featuring the top winners of c- span is student documentary competition. see their documentary is in full tuesday and wednesday morning.

stream of the winning videos any time on line at studentcam.org. >> now, south dakota senator john finn talks to the republican jewish coalition on a range of issues. this is half an hour. i want to grow that group. i have said for some time that when i have questions about what is happening and things i need to know about our relationship with israel, i get in todd -- i

get in contact with the jewish community in south dakota. what we lack in quantity we make up for in quality. he is quickly growing that organization. in fact, he has had a couple of times a pheasant hunt fund- raiser in south dakota. i attended the first one a little over a year ago. ari fleischer was there. matt came out for the fund- raiser. i have been trying to get him to come to south dakota and hunt pheasants for some time. it is something many people across the country take part in. anyway, i invited matt to come out, and what was interesting was, i was a little inworried about matt shooting somebody because he has a lot of experience hunting. as it turns out, and that ended up getting shot. -- matt ended up getting shot. [laughter]

when you are hunting pheasants, you always want to make sure you have your guns up and blue sky underneath. matt happens to be blocking a cornfield as the guys with guns were coming at him. somebody shot him. obviously not fatally, but it did draw blood, so for the rest of my life, i now have to deal with what came to matt when he came to south dakota. [laughter] my apologies for the state. that is not how we normally treat you when you come to south dakota. i would also like to introduce my wife kimberly and our two daughters. [applause] many of the guys in the room will appreciate this. my dad told me the day i got married that a man who says he is not afraid of his wife will lie about other things.

it is very important that we get those introductions taken care of. i do want to congratulate and complement the republican jewish coalition for the great job that you do for advocating on behalf of smaller government and behalf of freedom, and being in the arena, being in the fight on issues that are so important in our country today. i am grateful for your work because now more than ever, we need people securing the future of generations of american. my roots run deep in this country, particularly in the midwest. back in 1906, two brothers boarded the boat in norway in search of the american dream. when they landed on the shores of america, the only english words they knew were "apple pie close "and "coffee," which apparently they had a lot of on

the way over. when they got to america, the immigration officials said their last name would be too difficult to spell, so they asked them to change it. they picked the farm near where they worked in norway, which was the thune farm. with a new name and a new country, they set out to build a new life. they worked on the railroad. debate learned the english language. they started to experience -- they learned the english language. they started to experience and know the american dream. my father went on to become a decorated world war ii fighter pilot and a basketball star at the university of minnesota. my grandfather in stilled midwestern values that my father passed on to me.

they taught us the importance of living within your means even if it means going without. they taught us the importance of serving your neighbor and helping out your community. they taught us the importance of working hard and pulling your own weight. and they taught us the importance of appreciating the freedoms we have in this country, which are a gift that comes from living in the greatest country on the face of the earth. because of that upbringing, i believe in basic, core principles and values like limited government, fiscal responsibility and personal accountability. where i come from, that is not a radical agenda. that is just common sense. for those of us who value liberty and freedom, washington, d.c. has become a pretty lonely place in the past couple of years. but thanks to those in this room, we have some new friends in congress. [applause] we now have 242 seats in the

house of representatives and the speaker's gallery. we have some pretty tough people leading our charge there, like our good friend eric cantor. we may not have a majority yet, but we have the kind of committed, dedicated minority that can make a big difference. in november, use and republican leaders to washington, d.c. you sent the president and his allies of very important message. that is that the liberal party they have been having on the taxpayers time is over. [applause] despite the president's rhetoric about needing to make budget cuts -- and an op-ed he wrote recently about needing to cut red tape -- president obama has not gotten the message. he is still talking an awful lot about how much he wants to spend, although he now calls it investment. apparently he thought we would not notice it as much.

when his administration talks about making an investment, i think we all know by now what kind of return we can expect, more government, more jobs, -- more government, more dead, fewer jobs -- more debt, fewer jobs and less freedom. they pushed through a stimulus program that we borrowed from our children and grandchildren that did not create jobs or keep employment below 8% like what they had promised. when members of their own party will not support their agenda, they go around and do without through the executive power branch. the captain trade proposal they tried to get through congress -- cap and trade proposal that they tried to get through congress, which failed there, the epa is

now doing through regulation. the fcc is trying to regulate the internet. and if you can believe this, the epa actually has an active proposal in front of them to regulate fugitive dust. for those of you who perhaps come from the midwest and have an appreciation of agriculture, you will understand that it is an inherently dusty activity. when you are, in corn and the wind blows, the dust scatters around. their proposal says that just has to stay within the confine of your property. [laughter] you cannot make this kind of stuff up. we have seen the biggest expansion of government in the last two years of the last 50 years, literally. massive new programs, massive new spending, and of course, massive new debt.

it took 43 presidents 232 years to rack up our first $six trillion in publicly held debt. we are going to triple that in 10 years under the president's budget. that is how fast this debt is growing. the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said recently that the greatest threat to america's national security is our national debt. that is the highest-ranking military official in our country. think about the threats we face abroad. they are brave and -- they are brave and they are great. instability in the middle east, and ascendant china, north korea armed with nuclear weapons. the only thing more alarming than these threats is president obama's weak response. it cannot win against these

threats with deep cuts to our national defense. we cannot win the peace if we do not tell it like it is. an act of terrorism is an act of terrorism. we may call it a man-made disaster, but it is still a threat. we face serious challenges that require serious solutions. if we lived in any other country in the world, i would be seriously concerned whether not we were up to the job, but the american way is to turn adversity into opportunity. those that came before us survived two world wars, a great depression. they took down an evil empire. they turned this country into the greatest nation the world has ever noun, not by reinventing themselves, but by holding fast to america's sacred principles. we do not need to fundamentally transform america. we need to stay true to who we

are. how? in contrast to the current president, my hero is ronald reagan. ronald reagan once said that there are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. he understood that when you govern according to a clear set of principles and values, you get a good result. he believed in a limited role for the federal government. he was a profound believer that america is an exceptional nature -- nation. he believed in free market and free enterprise. he believed in fiscal responsibility and personal responsibility coupled with individual responsibility. he believed the u.s. achieve peace through strength. it is a core set of values and principles by which you can govern a great nation. i think we ought to take ta president reagan's advice and start by changing the way

washington does business. we can cut the backroom deals that have become the hallmark of this administration. congress is the people's house, and the people have a right to know what goes on there. they should respect the people's money by spending less and saving more. american families are having to make tough decisions and live within their means. the federal government should start to show some fiscal discipline and live within its books as well. when i was a freshman congressman in 1997, we all supported a balanced budget amendment. the united states senate voted on it first. they started it in the senate and the threshold of 67 votes. they got 66 votes. one of those short of passing a constitutional amendment. it did come through the house, we would've passed it, -- if it

had come through the house, we would have passed it, and i cannot help but think what is different world we would have been living in today if we had passed it. but it is never too late to do the right thing. we need to put in place policies that will grow our economy and create jobs. we need to lower the corporate tax rate. we have the highest in the industrial world next to japan, which is in the process of bringing theirs down. we need a tax system that is consistent with other countries in the world. we need to be a magnet for economic development and capital. we are losing that battle because of many of the policies we have in place. our small businesses and investors need to have certainty. we need to make rates permanence of the people can make investments for today and for the future. [applause] we cannot continue to do this on a year by year, a two-year

basis. we've got to give people economic certainty. i have to tell you that this year the budget is $3.8 trillion. that is what washington, d.c. is going to spend. we only taken $2.2 trillion. we are going to run a $1.6 trillion deficit. but you know what? this is not a revenue problem. there is plenty of revenue in washington, d.c. washington, d.c. has a spending problem, and we need to get the spending problem under control. [applause] when it comes to the issue of energy -- and i think this is part of a pro-growth strategy, because we spend a billion dollars every single day buying foreign or oil. and there is no reason for that. we need to end the moratorium in the gulf of mexico. we need to open up the

continental shelf. we need to open of federal lands where we have abundant energy resources right here in america. [applause] i come from a part of the country where we have a lot of renewable energy, biofuels, wind, things like that. we need to get to where we do not continue this practice we have maintained for the past decade of spending $1 billion of american money every single day and reaching countries in the middle east, which in many cases and up turning around and finding the very terrorist forces that are killing our troops. when it comes to national security, it is important that we not only win the war as of today but prepare for the threats of tamara -- wars of today, but prepare for the threats of tomorrow. it is important that we

remember who our allies are. our ally is now and always will be the state of israel. [applause] i think the obama administration sometimes forgets that basic fundamental fact. it seems that they have forgotten that no matter what it, we are not going to have a peace agreement in the middle east until the other countries in that region recognize israel's right to exist. [applause] if we're going to have any confidence in the good faith of the palestinians and the peace process, they must find some way to bring about the immediate release of the israeli soldier they kidnapped five years ago. [applause] one of my main concerns on the issue of the peace process is the disconnect between the obama administration and the people of israel concerning the primary threat in the region. i think it is pretty clear that

the primary threat is not the lack of a comprehensive peace process, it is the iranian nuclear program. now, the administration, when they entered office, devoted extensive time, effort and political capital to negotiating exactly that kind of middle east peace. what is from the rhetoric they used, you would think that israeli settlements were the primary impediment to the process rather than the supports -- support from iran of palestinian terrorist groups. that's agree that the iranian nuclear program -- let's agree that the iranian nuclear program is the primary threat. what else you do not hear much is how many other countries in the region are also concerned about the nuclear program.

we passed an act that was not intended -- president obama promised, "we are going to make sure that these sanctions are vigorously enforced." maybe one of the reasons the nuclear program continues and its aggressive support of terrorism continues is that the sanctions are not being vigorously enforced at all. the administration has sanctioned exactly two companies under the energy prong of that act, and that is despite knowing that their companies today engaged in censurable activities. it is completely inexcusable. it does nothing to encourage iran to change its behavior. there are events taking place in the middle east and north africa

today that really truly are amazing. i do not want to take too much time, because i know time is limited, other than to briefly highlight some of the developments in three countries specifically, egypt, libya and syria. first of all, libya. the obama administration has taken military action to enforce a no-fly sound and support rebel troops there. what the president has failed to do is provide answers to some very important questions. what is the benchmark for success? isn't acceptable for muammar gaddafi to remain in power after the military effort concludes? president obama said earlier this week that he embraced the goal of gaddafi being out of power, but he specifically rejected using military power to accomplish that goal. so how exactly will gaddafi be removed from power? we should not be risking the

lives of u.s. service members without answers to critical questions helping us understand the purpose behind the use of military power. [applause] syria is a tricky situation at the moment, but there are some steps that the united states of america can and should take. one is, we need to speak with more clarity on this issue of support of democratic ideals. we should not be calling the syrian president a reformer, as secretary of state clinton did this past week. ladies and gentlemen, syria remains a state sponsor of terror, continues to transfer destabilizing weapons, is not cooperating with iaea activities, and is a transit point for foreign fighters into

iraq. i do not know about you, but these are hardly the actions of a reformer. second, president obama should recall the u.s. ambassador from damascus immediately. [applause] syria did not deserve to be rewarded with an official ambassador in the first place, but the president did it anyway. we should not compound that ever -- that error by keeping an ambassador in place. i will close this whirlwind tour of the middle east with just one more statement about what is happening in egypt. any government in egypt resulting from the democracy movement there must respect the peace treaty with israel or should not be a government with which the united states does business. [applause] ladies and gentlemen, we're a critical time in the life of the

nation. as we try to find the right path forward, it is absolutely vital that we look to the past for guidance. i remember meeting with all of you about three or four years ago. you were nice enough to ask me to come and make some remarks at an event. i remember as i was concluding my remarks, a gentleman walked into the room who died did not recognize immediately, -- who i did not recognize immediately, but who was introduced as ellie weisel. i was impressed, but what was more impressive was the impact it had on my daughter. she has had the opportunity to see political figures and celebrities and could not be less impressed by some of those folks. but when she got the opportunity

to meet ellie weisel, she was literally shaking, because she had read his book and was so moved by it, so impacted by it. to this day, that is one of the most memorable events in her young life. i thought about that as i was thinking about this. we have got to learn the lessons of the past and we need to enter-generation only help young people today understand the mist ly and helpnerational ma young people today understand the lessons of the past. i thought of something ronald reagan once said. he said the freedom at any given time is only one generation removed from extinction. it cannot be passed on in the bloodstream. it has to be fought for and protected and handed down for our children to do the same.

or one day, we will spend our sunset years telling our children's children what was once like to live in the united states of america where men were freed. the world is a dangerous place, and nowhere more dangerous than the middle east. we need to make sure that we always keep in mind the lessons that the past has to teach us. we need to make sure that the next generation learns those lessons as well. america's national security, our independence from foreign oil, our freedom from the burden of debt, these are all tough challenges. we have a tough road ahead if we are going to get america back on track. we face hard choices, and we need to make the right decisions. republicans have outlined what we believe are the right answers. our message is not just about austerity, but of prosperity. we are going to face opposition to our agenda and to our ideas, a diner that kind of political

fight is not scare any -- we're going to face opposition to our agenda and our ideas, but i know that kind of political fight does not scare anyone in this room. together we have come a long way, but we still have a lot to do. we need to get this country back to the values that made my grandfather and some many like him risk it all to reach our shores. we need to protect the principles that men like my father fought for on battlefields in faraway places. we need to stand up for the values and ideals and principles that made this the greatest country on earth, to expand liberty, to expand freedom, and to stop the reckless expansion of parliament. if we do that together we will in -- the reckless expansion of government. if we do that, we will make sure the great american experiment does not and on our watch. thank you for all that you do. god bless you and may he

continue to bless the united states of america. thank you. [applause] >> this year, we asked students from across the country to consider washington d.c. through their lands. today's first prize winner addressed an issue that better help them understand the role of government. >> i use the internet every day to talk to friends on web sites like facebook. i use the internet for research for school papers. the internet is something that our generation has grown up with and takes for granted. we use it every day for

research, entertainment, and everything in between. most americans have assumed it will always be, but will it? for one person, it will not. >> it is like cable television, where the network operators and choose what content you are going to be able to see. >> this is a debate over what is known as network neutrality. net neutrality is the idea that all traffic flowing across the internet should be at the same speed, and a provider should not be able to speed up, slow down or block content. it sounds simple, right? this is the way the internet has operated since its start.

>> there is tremendous agreement that right now there is net neutrality in place where consumers can get the access to the content and applications and services of their choice. >> the question is, should the federal government get in the business of enforcing a regulation, or should this be left in the private sector? if we keep it in the private sector, things would remain as they are now, at least, we hope they would. >> the technology that the network operators would employ to be able to take content, blogged and prioritize it, exists. clearly, they would like to be able to monetize the delivery of content. we want to preserve the open and neutral networks that we have today. >> however, the chairman of net

competition believes differently. >> the issue is whether or not the government formally regulates that. i would disagree strongly with you in the sense that you discuss this as preserving the status quo. you do not need regulation to maintain the status quo. >> to get from the status quo to guaranteed net neutrality, there are several paths the federal government can take. first, the fcc tried to apply the existing regulations. that happened back in 2008 when the fcc decided to punish comcast for selectively blocking content. comcast appealed, and the washington, d.c., federal appeals court ruled that the fcc had overstepped its authority.

the fcc decided to go through a process to clarify its authority. it would have a legal enforcement mechanism to deal with net neutrality issues. here, the chairman explains one of the three rules that make up the proposed regulation. >> we make it clear that we are not in favor of fast lanes for some companies but not others. >> they are poised to vote on the regulation. >> this may culminate as early as december of this year. >> i am here at the fcc headquarters, where they took of the note on that the regulation -- took of the on the

proposed regulation. -- took a vote on the proposed regulation. as we know, republicans gained control of the house and took away the democrats' supermajority in the senate. the chairman of the fcc analyzed the election results on his blog. out of 95 candidates for congress who pledged support for net neutrality, not a single one got elected. this does not mean that the election was lost because of their support for net neutrality, but it led him to an important conclusion. >> what it showed was that the people who most supported net neutrality did not have the support of the american people in the election.

>> he offered this position on the prospects of net neutrality. >> i do not think you're going to see net neutrality as an issue in the new congress. >> how will this issue affect you? on one hand, proponents say net neutrality will level the playing field between big and small companies. >> and open internet is, perhaps as much as anything else, the great equalizer. it allows people with innovative ideas to succeed on the merits of those ideas. >> on the other hand, opponents say that government involvement will be exactly the opposite of what proponents say it will be. they will make it more difficult for all entrepreneurs to start small businesses. >> if there is no problem, do not fix it. fixing a problem that does not

exist will create many worse problems. >> as you can see, the issue of net neutrality demonstrates how the interests of the government can influence our community. do not let yourself be fooled. just because the fcc has approved net neutrality the legislation, does not mean the battle is over. a simple majority in the house or senate could overturn it. the regulation will face serious legal challenges. americans should expect to hear more and more about neutrality in the future as the story unfolds. we do not know what is going to happen, but one thing is clear. whether you are for or against it, americans cannot stop talking about net neutrality.

>> continue the conversation about today's documentary on our facebook page. >> here is our prime time schedule on c-span. starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern, a look at same-sex marriage in the u.s. with a political strategist who helped carry forward the lawsuit to overturn california's proposition 8. then, a discussion on legal aliens and deportation. and, a commission investigates how u.s. tax dollars are being spent in afghanistan and iraq. >> tonight, fcc commissioner on the wireless industry, the expansion of broadband, and the commission's role in the proposed purchase of t mobil by at&t. >> there is a big difference between us and the department of justice, which concentrates on antitrust oversight.

we have a public interest standard which includes looking at competition, how the market looks, how the existing players in the market will be affected, how consumers will be affected. >> that is tonight on c-span-2. >> tomorrow, a former faa administrator on the increasingly crowded skies, recent incidents involving air- traffic controllers sleeping. then, we talk about self funds containing tracking devices -- containing tracking devices and concerns about privacy. that is live tomorrow it's 7:00 a.m. eastern here on c-span.

up next, remarks from gen the bush -- jenna bush and her memories of the white house. this is 45 minutes. >> this event would not be possible without our generous co-sponsors. we would like you to help us

recognize the indiana university college of education. furthermore, we wish to recognize the tireless efforts of our outstanding committee members who have made tonight reality. lectures and union board are proud to present the keynote speaker whose actions speak far louder than words. she is a teacher, a correspondent, and author, a literacy advocate, and an avid supporter of unicef. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to indiana university, jenna bush hager. [applause] >> thank you so much. we had some dinner with the students before, and i have never seen such a student- empowered, student-run group.

that is pretty terrific that you have this at your university. thank you for your kind introduction and for all of the work that you do to get speakers here on behalf of your students. i am honored to be here to speak during women's history month. we have three women in my family and we always gang up against my dad. when you have a grandmother like i have, you cannot help but be a real supporter of women. i am thrilled to be here today to share some stories about some of the places i have seen, the people i have met, and especially the remarkable children and teenagers who have deeply affected my life. in fact, the first time i saw the white house it was through the innocent, optimistic eyes of a 7-year-old. for the four years my grandfather was president, my cousins and i would run in the endless corridors. we would play house in the east

rim and sardines on the east lawn. our imaginations were formed by this truly magical place. a little over 10 years ago -- i will not say exactly how long, because i do not want to age myself on a college campus -- when my mom and dad sat us down and told us our dad was going to run for president, barbara and i wanted to veto that idea. we wanted to be normal college kids. we quickly realized the privilege of being a part of living history. we were privileged to meet many extraordinary people, heads of state, royalty, the pope. i got to see the texas longhorns after they won the national championship.

i met a personal hero, the founder of teach for america, and i was fortunate to travel to foreign lands and was deeply moved by what i saw. in fact, it was trips to africa and latin america that motivated me to begin working with hiv aids and the ranks of women and children all over the world. i believe the more we know about the plight of people all over the world, the more likely we are to help others. theven recently joined m media. last fall, i started working as a contributing correspondent to the today show. this job allows me to talk about the people that are making a difference. one of my first pieces was about a woman who grew up in a texas border town.

the town was a tiny, one road town set against the vast and rugged rio grande plains. the town is rich in heritage but mired in poverty. many of the residents are migrant workers. in fact, when this woman was a young girl, she would migrate with her family to work in the fields. when she was growing up and the 1980's, many of her peers did not graduate from high school. few even consider the local community college. during her junior year of high school, she had a teacher who was determined to raise expectations for his students. he urged them to apply to college and to pursue their dreams. he bravely rented a 24-person passenger van during their spring break and drove all of his kids from their rural town to the east coast ivy league schools he said they should apply to.

his faith in his students and power her to do something no one in her family had ever done, applied to college. she was accepted by yale university, one of the school she visited on spring break. after graduating, she returned to her town to teach. she could have taken a number of high-paying jobs, but she could not think of anything more worthwhile than helping others in her home town the same way her beloved english teacher had helped her in the years before. last fall, i visited her at the same after-school program her teachers started, which she now runs. of the 150 students in the program each year, 100% go on to college. many of them to top tier schools. in fact, in the years since she attended yale, at least 50 students from this tiny community have gone on to ivy

league colleges. i met one of her students, who spoke with me about the importance of the program. she told me about returning from the midwest, where she migrated with her parents and sister to work in sugar cane fields. she told me, with determination in her eyes, that she is going to college. harvard is our first choice, because she wants to be able to decide what she is going to do with her own life. she is tired of working in the fields out of necessity. i could see how much she was in all of her mentor. with the role model like that, i have so much faith that she is going to build her own future, a future away from the fields. she is leading all of these young men and women on to college. one teacher took an interest in me. one person changed my life.

i want to instill in my students the confidence to pursue their own dreams, to build their own paths. i have seen firsthand how quality education can give students a chance to excel and break the cycle of poverty they were born into. after i graduated from college, i taught at a charter school in inner-city washington, d.c. this was not a glamorous career i had envisioned as a little girl, teaching a roomful of quiet and obedient dolls. my mom did the same when she was a little girl, and we used to joke that based on the [no audio]

ok, we will switch to a hand microphone. we used to joke that we had the best educated dolls in america. i did not look as lovely and composed as my mom did in her days as a teacher in texas. during my first year at the charter school, i was a mess. despite my best effort, my clothes always seem to be recalled. my sweater was covered with ink and my pants full of chalk. due to a lack of rest, i felt like i had a perpetual cold, and i lived on instant coffee. even when i did sleep, i dreamed of my students. ask any teacher, a teaching can take a lot out of you, but the good things in life are often hard one. after that first year of exhaustion and frustration, trying to herd 30 kids onto the

subway for a field trip, or mopping up lucky charms before 7:00 a.m., i was rewarded with creativity, joy and eternal optimism that you can only learn from seeing through the eyes of a child. by the end of the first year, my kids had given me a gift that every teacher yearns for. in some small way, i had help them become curious, independent, eager learners. most of my students were immigrants from latin america. the more i learned i educated fr unison at, latin america. latin america and the care been have become places i cherish. these are places of great contrast. the children i met are doing -- dealing with staggering levels

of poverty. they do not have adequate clothing or shelter and many lack basic primary education. far too many have h.i.v.- eighths. i recently returned from guatemala, where i told the story for nbc about malnutrition. this is supposed -- this is the most malnourished area in the country. 50% has chronic malnutrition. in this town at least 70% of the children are malnourished. by 3, their brains will have growing. in a small village, i visited a mother and her five children. they lived in a one-room.

she proudly showed me heard third floor home where she and her baby is called for warmth. she treats the cloth for the local clothing and brings in $5 a week. $5 to feed six people. stomach hadt son's begun to swell. there was no light in his eyes. he was chronically malnourished. libya was terrified. she knew the system is all too well. she had already lost a child to the complications of malnutrition. luckily lydia is part of the program to keep her baby is healthy. she walks for hours every week to receive educational classes and packets of micro nutrients. sprinkles look like sugar packets, but they contain

nutrients, everything kids need to develop normally. they unknowingly at the bottom of the need. i sat in a tiny hut as she cradled her boy. she told me that aren't nights and days when she has nothing to feed her kids. she puts them to bed early. she continued tears in her eyes. i do not care about the pangs of hunger i feel. i just care about them, my children. when i have food, i give it to them. i asked her if she did say one thing to the people in united states, which he say? she immediately looked at me and said, thank you. the key to all the people who care about our plight. thank you to those who donate to units that sell at packets the keep my baby is healthy.

i want you to know that i appreciate all their help. i appreciate everything that they do. gracias, thank you. i traveled around latin america and the caribbean, document the lives of children, mothers, and the program to help them healthier lives. my personal mission is to bring kids the attention of as many people as possible so that become more than just a statistic. it is the details of people's lives that resonate with us. their stories are what encourage us to change cannot learn, take action. during my time working at unicef, i worked in the caribbean, a well-known vacation destinations. there is another side. many of the people who live there must contend with backward

economies, poverty, violence, and other issues. for example, the caribbean is the part of the world with the second highest prevalence of hiv-aids. i returned several months ago from haiti, were met people who want to rebuild haiti better. i was unaware of that diary circumstances there before the earthquake. 50% of children was not in school, and 80% of the population made money from an informal and come. i know we are still in shock from the massive loss of life and terrible devastation brought on by the earthquake, but as i visited, i was -- the the state of haiti now which is

devastating. port-au-prince is a remarkably peaceful place, and it is still covered in rubble. remains of houses, cars, and debris covered the streets. tented cities are scattered around the capital. where is the hope? it resides in the getting and a compassionate nature of its people. over the weeks we met heroes everywhere. a woman who started a clinic by herself when she saw there was no medicine in her city. a man who helps his neighbors rebuild houses after work for nothing. a young girl who, even though she lost her mother, sings songs of healing. in a tented city, we met a 35- year-old woman, who is a nurse at the only clinic in the city. she provides relief for all the

people there. before the earthquake, she and her husband were part of the small middle class, and they lived in a home with two children. her house was ruined in the earthquake, and like others, she was forced to move her life to a can. she was happy and relieved, knowing her whole family had survived. as she said, we made it out pretty good. my kids are still here. during that first month living in the displaced city, she met 74 kids who have lost parents. they were orphans wandering the city alone. she knew she must do something. these kids could not grow up wanderers. she bought a tent next to hers where all the kids now live. she calls them her children, and

they call her mom. her husband told me he thinks she is crazy. she is not an the process of finding them homes or adopting them herself. she even opened a school and attended city so all the kids, hers and those who had not found -- lost their parents, could get an education. she could have taken care of her family of four, but she said these kids are my kids, too. i hope others in my community would have done for these kids for my kids what i am doing for these kids. we must take care of haiti. if we do not, who will? when i worked in latin america, i attended a unicef sponsored conference for women and kids living with hiv. i met a girl named anna. she had lived a life of someone

older than 17. she had lived an extremely difficult life. at birth she was infected hiv- aids. her mother and sister died. she had been shuffled around most of her life, abandoned, neglected by the people that she cared about most. she was forced to drop out of school at 16 after she had her baby. one thing is amazing. we talked with students earlier at dinner about the power of education. i understood it, working in washington, d.c., but i understood it on a much more global level when i was working with anna. her mom was abused and she did not know she had hiv. she unknowingly passed it on to anna's father. and now that the education she needed. she attended classes with a

local nonprofit that held down mothers that the information they needed so their babies would be borne hiv free. when we first return to latin america, the first thing we were able to do was anna and st,trice to get their hiv tes and i'm happy to say that education has the power -- when i was at this conference, four or five times the size of this, a huge room filled with tons of people, and stood up with beatrice's wrapped in her arms and told the crowd so bravely i want everyone to know we are living with hiv. we are not dying from it. we have to get the information that this is not the '80s. i was so moved by her confidence and the jury and humor that for the next month

that i lived in the region we began meeting daily, and i listened to the traffic and the beautiful details of her life. although i did not go to latin america with the thought of writing a book, i was so moved by anna stories and those children i met at all wanted their stories tall. we work together and ultimately titled able called "anna's story: a story of hope." she wanted kids in the united states to get facts of living with hiv. she looked at my binder, and asked i thought i had spelled the word wrong, but it was not a misspelling. it was the word that bothers her. she told me, i was bored with hiv. please do not characterize me as

sick. did not call me sick. hiv cannot be a success to me. it is the situation in my life. she lived with it the best she can. these are stories of courage and hope and our store is being written with the help of the american people. i was fortunate to visit africa with my parents. a hospital in san nadal was started by an american who arrived as a peace corps worker and saw the need for hiv patients get good nutrition. he used his life experiences growing up on a kansas farm and called the nonprofit project he started development in gardening. he treated a communal garden that offered patients fresh the decibels as well as a fund social activity, gardening. at the hospital, my mother and i joined the circle of women

infected with hiv aids. two young women were new to the grit and told touching stories. they were both young and beautiful, and they both had been abused by men in their communities and their four hiv- positive. it was hard for them to hold back tears as they courageously cold grin tales of abuse, a stigma, and isolation. after they finished, my mom helped them and told them about and out of storage, and with proper medication, and not was doing well and her baby was helping. one of the girls looked at me with eyes and said, why did not choose to tell our story can you please tell our story? today here i am doing just that. i hope by telling you these stories it will inspire at least one of the act. i want to thank you for

everything you have already do. i note you guys are very active on your campus making sure you give back. you are already making a huge difference in your community. kids like and do not just live in other countries. i was in kansas and we were talking about that, talking with a group of public school teachers who said, there is kids just like anna who live here, and that is of course true. poverty, violence, illness transcends borders. there is plenty of ways to get back. you do not have to go to latin america to find a way to do that. whether pledging time or money, whatever it is you do, there are practical steps you can all take to help others. he'd have the chance to change people's lives. every small at will be an investment worth your while. if there is anything people have taught me is that life is precious gift and it is a

privilege and opportunity as much as a responsibility to give some of yourself for people in need. i have learned inviable lessons, and i have found sometimes teachers in the most unexpected places. thanks so much for having me. i appreciate you sharing your tuesday night on a college campus. i am sure there are more fun things to do. that is so much for having me, and i think we are going to do some questions and answers. take you so much for coming. i appreciate it. [applause] >> thank you again. we have a few questions we are going to asks that we got from you tonight. we will do that. then following that, if you want to talk to jenna after the lecture, she can talk to you,

and state for that. we will do questions now. >> a mei on the poster? it could be scared. >> it is a good picture. >> howdy you think college students will get best involved in humanitarian efforts? >> there is a lot of ways. i tutored when i was in college. there was a program in east austin. there was an amazing program that a college student started, partnering with a school in one of the most marginalized parts of austin. everybody would go. it was what you did. he would spend time and to these kids and was as successful that it changed the trajectories of these children's lives and changed the school. it is one of the best schools in austin now in one of the poorest

neighborhoods. there is so many ways. at the briag, my sister has started a nonprofit call the global health court. -- corps. i was at an aid conference in severn cisco -- in san francisco. i met two kids from stanford, and they were the founding teens, who were seniors, and then my sister, we had been on college a little bit longer. that was ok. they had already -- johnny sey had already started a nonprofit in college. a lot of people underestimate

how dynamic college students are, and i am -- i know unicef, being one example, and care, another organization i am involved with, as college campus clubs all over the country. i am not sure if there here at indiana. there is plenty of ways to get involved. it is hard for me to say what you guys have here after school, but i am sure, i could ask somebody in the audience, but there are so many ways. i have one piece of advice that somebody gave me when i was in high school, but it was traded price. find what you love. i worked at the children's shelter and i loved it, i loved being with kids. people would say to my sister, that is so good of you to do that. he did not do it because it was good. she did it because she was

passionate about it, she wanted to change the face of global health. she works 24 hours a day. she does it because she is passionate. find anything interested. if you're interested in sports, coach the team. there is so many ways to get involved. >> next question is, as a public-school teacher, you feel light public education is in need of an overhaul? >> yes. yes. there is no doubt about it. i do not want to get too controversial, i have taught in only urban schools in west baltimore, also in d.c. i have just recently interviewed a founder of teacher for america, and michelle rhee, and everybody believes in our

public schools wants reforms believes there is a crisis going on. the top of that at the dinner with it before that when i started teaching in washington, the needed more teachers in the area i taught, because it was marginalize, it was a really poor area, and that is a sad statistics. kids that are living in poor areas cannot give as good an education as those who live in a welfare area. that is not typically american, as michelle rhee said. we promised the education for everybody, and that is not what is happening. i interviewed a teacher recently who told me the reason why he thought he does what he does is because he thinks this biggest social and just and -- injustice in our country right now is the education system. there is some amazing teachers

out there, and there are some teachers that are working hard to make sure that every child gets a good education. there's a lot of needs to be done, and i think we talked about it, the answers are pretty simple, making sure every teacher and every classroom in america is highly effective. that is important. michelle rhee try to do that in washington, d.c., and she lay off teachers that were not being effective, and she lost her job. it seems like a simple solution, highly effected teachers, al, but itprincip is complicated, i hot-button issues. i would say ask any effective teacher, i met with them before we came here, they want what is best for kids. what is best for kids this for every child, no matter what your color, neighborhood 11, religion, to get the very best

education. and that is not happening. >> how the you find your -- [unintelligible] >> that is really fun. i was shocked that i got the job for work on the "today" show. i loved teaching and when i rwrote, the executive producer tracked me down and said we think you would be really good on tv. i said you got the wrong person. coming back it, there is so many ways to make a difference, and one of the ways to do is make sure that we are kidding really great information out there and telling stories of inspirational people that are doing terrific things. my husband was -- given the chance, to a four year, six months. you can always stop.

i have liked it, and i love writing the story. i just did a story on a charter school. it is this amazing charter school that teaches music education, and it is a rigorous curriculum, in a really poor part of memphis. the kids are thriving. they were so much to be with and they are brilliant. to be able to document a school like that, and i just read about that school, heard about it to friends in education, to be able to make sure that others knew about that school and to hopefully get some publicity so it can do a terrific things, it is a privilege. really, just reading. i have a lot of friends to work and education, hiv aids. my favorite story has been when i got to go to ethiopia, he the,

what the mall, and tell stories there. guatamala, and tell stories there. >> what was it like to be in the white house during the time of 9/11? what were the emotions like? >> i've was not at the white house on september 11. i was away at college in texas. of course, we can all remember what september 11 was like. it was hard because my parents were there and i was away from them. we actually -- i think we came

back the week my parents got us plane tickets and we flew home the weekend after or two weekends after. to make sure we could all be together, because i could not -- i did not hear from. i got taken to a hotel. i looked outside my apartment, and there was likely a lot of secret service and i did not have a lot of secret service. i knew something was wrong. i turned on the tv. my sister and i got taken away to different hotels, and we could talk, but my parents -- we could not hear from them until later on in the evening. we all remembered what it was like. living in new york right now, i constantly and meeting people who have lost someone in the world trade center. i think it is something that will stay in our culture change

us. living in new york, too, new yorkers have not forgotten. most of america has not. it was not any different for me than it was for anybody else. >> how was a college experience? how has it changed your life? >> i loved college. i miss college. i was telling students before, one of the things -- a piece of advice my mom had given me that both my sister tried to do, and it is a good piece of advice, it is a -- treat college like a job, and harder you work the better you will do. also, take the hardest classes. -- the best professor and "i just want the easiest class because i want to go out with friends." you're in college to learn. he did not have that long.

for years goes by so fast treat junior and senior year, i would try to find out who wrote the book or who was the best in his poetry class ticke? i wanted to write, and there is a chance to go back, which hopefully i will do soon. get your masters or ph.d.. there's no other chance for you to get that amazing amount of information and to learn from these really talented professors. i would say that is my one piece of advice. i assured you are like i don't want advice from her anyway. make sure your class is excellent and has an excellent professor. that is why you are here. i loved college. i still write, and my professors that i met their when i was learning, that i wanted to

write, and i was in a creative writing program. really shake me. i remember what they wrote on my papers about finding my voice, and i was slowly doing it. i still hear one of my professors who i love, a published writer, who studies at lot of taxes literature, doctor graham in texas. he was at my wedding. i think he is instrumental in helping me understand that i had the talent and not to be worried put it out there. so, enjoy college. , do you received your -- do you see your mom and your grandmother as role models in your teaching career? >> yes. i find my grandmother as being a role model in a strong woman.

i was saying earlier, when somebody is so passionate about what they did, you can feel it. when my mom would tell us stories about her kids teaching, i always wanted that. the hat that passion or something. -- the have that passion or something. my first teaching job was in d.c., and she was living there at the time. i would go straight from school and talk about my kids. a lot of people would be turned off by that much talking about education, but if you are passionate about it, and she loved that, and she would always love to hear the stories come and see great -- she gave me great pieces of advice. that was a really memorable time, my first year of teaching, been able to sure this sounds with her.

now what he you feel is the most challenging problem our world ?aces a >> i think education. when you look at all of issues, health, now you shearson, disease, everything, poverty, every single thing, even violence can be broken. all those cycles has been -- can be -- as occasion has the power to change people's lives. it has to be a great education. in most of the world kids are not getting that. when i was in kansas talking with schoolteachers, you see it on a larger level, when ec lives being saved. when i am telling you about the lidia, she saved her son's

life. there is nothing more powerful than that. i think education. i am also interested in hiv aids. there is a lot. there is a thousand different issues in our world. we are becoming more of a global society. when i talk with young people, you will agree, with the internet and feeling connected people and other countries, to me, global issues are more important than some of the silly things we think about here in the united states. >> my grandparents wanted me to tell you that you are a g em!!!!

>> grandparent's love me. "my grandma loves you." that's better than nobody. thank you, whoever said that, i appreciated. >> that was our last card. we want to thank jenna for coming to speak. >> thank you. >> we are now want to move the outside. thank you for coming. >> here is the prime-time schedule. starting at 8:00 p.m., a look at same-sex marriage in the u.s., with a political strategist who helped carry

forward the lawsuit to overturn california proposition 8. then a discussion on the record number of illegal aliens and deportations. and the commission on wartime contract thing investigate how tax dollars are being spent in afghanistan iraq. tomorrow, marion blakey on increasingly crowded skies. then cell phones containing tracking devices and concerns over privacy. then a former director talks about the role his organization placed in disaster response. he will speak with student cam's first prize winner. like tomorrow on c-span. >> send me the bill in its

present form, i will sign it. ok, any questions? >> presidents and journalists meet at a dinner to make fun of themselves. watch live or go back and watch a past dinner. share online at the c-span video program, every program since 1987. watch what you want when you want. >> rear today eric holder bout to continue prosecuting terrorists suspects in federal court, saying the department brought a record number of terrorism cases in the last few years. this came in a speech before justice department employees. this is 25 minutes.

>> good morning, everyone. it is a pleasure to welcome some many friends and colleagues from across the department this morning and to welcome the attorney general. almost 35 years ago, the attorney general began his career here at the department in the public integrity section, a job that led him to take on other roles in justice, including appointments as the united states attorney her e. i was pleased to welcome him

back to the department two years ago. eric holder's career has given him an inside view of the department and its capabilities shared by few other attorneys general. we are working today in an environment that has great challenges and that has great uncertainty. what i have been privileged to see firsthand is that there is no uncertainty and this attorney general house vision for what the department of justice and its employees can accomplish for the nation and for its citizens. ladies and gentlemen, please help meanwhile, the 82nd attorney general, eric holder. [applause] >> thank you. thank you.

thank you. thank you. everybody got annual leave for this, i suppose. you did not have to take annually. >> good morning, and thank you all for being here and for tuning in from department of justice offices across the country. it is a pleasure to join lee in welcoming so many colleagues and critically important partners here today. i'd also like to thank lee -- and each of our assistant attorneys general, our associate attorney general, and all of our component heads -- for their outstanding leadership of the department, and for the invaluable guidance that -- over the last two years -- they have provided to me. and although he could not be here today, i also want to thank our deputy attorney general, jim cole, for his dedicated partnership and friendship -- not only over the last few months, but also over the last few decades, since the two of us -- fresh out of law school -- began our careers in this great department.

nearly 35 years ago, i arrived here, to this building, to begin my "dream job" as a line attorney in the criminal division's public integrity section. the day before starting work, i had moved down from new york city, assuring my friends and family that i only would be in washington for a couple of years. that was 1976. what i did not know then -- but soon discovered -- is that i had been given a once--in--a-- lifetime opportunity: the chance to be part of a highly skilled and motivated team -- an extraordinary group of men and women who -- in common cause and through individual action -- were reaffirming our nation's founding principles of liberty, equality, and security; helping to shape america's future; and taking innovative and collaborative steps to protect our fellow citizens. contributing to this work -- our work -- quickly became, and continues to be, the most

thrilling and rewarding experience of my professional life. in the years that i have been privileged to serve this department, i have worked alongside -- and learned from -- some of the world's most talented and dedicated lawyers, law enforcement officials, and public servants. every day, you and your colleagues -- a team that's now more than 114,000 members strong -- carry out your important jobs with the simple, but essential, goals of protecting and improving lives -- and pursuing justice in every case, every circumstance, and every community. you demonstrate how the law can be a powerful force for good -- a protector of those we serve; and a driver of change and progress, of tolerance and inclusion, of peace and prosperity. and you have proven that -- in the work of ensuring justice for all, opportunity for all, and security for all -- one person can make a difference. like you, i love this

department. and, like you, i am proud -- not only to serve it, but also to champion its work. just over two years ago, together, we launched a new chapter in the department's extraordinary history. and i was honored that -- on that february day -- so many of you welcomed me home. that day, as i stood before you -- and swore the oath of office for the last job i will ever hold here -- i laid out three priorities that would guide our work. first, and most importantly, i promised that the department's top priority -- and our chief responsibility -- would be protecting the security, rights, and interests of the american people. i also pledged to reinvigorate the department's traditional missions and breathe new life into important areas that had been overlooked in recent years. finally, i promised to heal the department -- by rebuilding

morale and restoring credibility. as a young lawyer, i had seen my first boss and one of my personal heroes -- attorney general edward levi -- do just that in the wake of the watergate scandal. at a time of deep national division -- and widespread cynicism and mistrust of government -- he provided the leadership and vision necessary to bring this department together, to raise standards, and to remind the american people of why this institution -- and its work to protect this nation -- is essential, and how it positively affects every city and community; every neighborhood and home; every life. two years later, i am proud to say that we have kept our word. because of you -- your hard work, your commitment, your willingness to sacrifice, and your eagerness to improve the lives of others -- we have made meaningful, measurable progress in fulfilling the pledges we made to the american people. of course, it hasn't always been easy.

department of justice employees face some of the most challenging circumstances and complex issues in government. and your work has never been more difficult. together, we have witnessed our nation's most severe environmental catastrophe, and responded to a historic financial crisis that left our economy severely crippled. we have faced increasingly sophisticated criminal enterprises, and worked to keep pace with the cutting--edge technologies that have brought new opportunities for criminals to commit theft and fraud. we have responded to growing demands and leveraged limited resources -- and you have risen to the occasion when asked to accomplish more with less. and while confronting and overcoming a broad range of challenges, we have sustained an ongoing battle against determined -- and constantly evolving -- enemies. together, we also have mourned the loss of innocent lives. we have struggled to understand -- and to prevent -- unspeakable

acts of violence. and we have paid tribute, and our last respects, to law enforcement heroes who -- in the line of duty and in the service of their country -- have made the ultimate sacrifice. but despite these and other challenges, we have taken critical steps forward in meeting the goals -- and fulfilling the responsibilities -- that i laid out two years ago. we have thwarted serious -- and potentially devastating -- terrorist plots. we have adapted our operations to identify and disrupt national security threats. and we have prosecuted more terrorists than in any other two--year period in history. in addition to advancing our national security efforts, we have reformed and strengthened the way this department works. we have found innovative ways to foster transparency, accountability, and professionalism across every

component. we have reestablished the authority of career officials to make hiring decisions. we have launched landmark initiatives to foster diversity across the department's ranks and to ensure that all americans -- no matter where they live or how much money they make -- can access our justice system. we have developed training programs and new tools to ensure the highest standards of conduct among prosecutors. and we have signaled that, once again, the civil rights division is open for business and true to its founding principles. across the department, and in our united states attorneys' offices, we have raised both standards and spirits -- and restored public faith in our critical work. we also have shown that, if mistakes are made along the way, we will admit them; we will act immediately to correct them; and we will move forward with the central goals of protecting

-- and achieving justice for -- the american people. we have also made strategic investments to revitalize the department's traditional missions -- investments that, already, are paying dividends. we have re--invigorated our working collaboration with state and local law enforcement in making our communities safer. and we have provided targeted, evidence--based assistance to communities under the recovery act and through our critical grant programs. over the past two years, we've filed a record number of civil rights criminal cases, and secured an all--time high in civil recoveries for taxpayers and victims. we've led government--wide efforts to respond to the largest oil spill in our nation's history, and made certain that taxpayers do not foot the bill for its cleanup. and just last week, we secured a conviction -- in the biggest

bank fraud prosecution of this generation -- against the former chairman of a private mortgage lending company for his role in a nearly $3 billion fraud scheme. in addition, we have strengthened the rule of law across our country and beyond our borders -- and established the international partnerships necessary to combat global threats and 21st--century crimes. and we have helped to advance important changes in policy and legislation -- including the reduction of the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity, the passage of landmark hate crimes legislation, and the implementation of reforms to ensure that dna evidence is used to convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent. your work matters. and your success is no hollow achievement. your constant vigilance and ongoing commitment to collaboration, the sleep that you've sacrificed and the time with your families that you've cut short, the hours that you've logged in offices and

courthouses, in the back rooms of investigation sites and on the front lines of community safety efforts -- that work has made a difference. it has allowed our fellow americans to know peace and security, while maintaining faith in our nation's system of justice. you deserve -- and you have earned -- my deepest gratitude. you are patriots in every sense of the word. over the last two years, you have made our nation not only safer, but stronger. i am proud -- and each of you should be proud -- of what we have accomplished. without question, the results that we've achieved have been historic. but i am not yet satisfied. and i don't want you to be either. as we consider where we must go from here, i am reminded of attorney general levi's assurance -- 35 years ago -- that "the agenda of the department is inevitably unfinished[and] is also always

boundless." boundless, too, are the opportunities now before us. so, today, as we look toward the future, we will take action in four key areas to fulfill one core mission: protecting the american people. these priorities will allow us to build on the record of success that we've established, and they will guide our future efforts. first and foremost: we will protect americans from terrorism and other threats to national security -- both at home and abroad. using every available resource and appropriate tool, we will continue to disrupt terrorist plots, thwart potential attacks, and vigorously prosecute those who seek to harm our nation and our people. we will aggressively pursue emerging threats around the world and at home, and enhance our ability to gather and analyze actionable intelligence.

we will engage in outreach efforts to all communities in order to prevent terrorism before it occurs. we will be vigilant -- not only against international terrorist organizations, but also against domestic extremist groups, militias, and other home--grown threats. and let me be very clear about this: we will continue to rely on our most powerful and most proven tool in bringing terrorists to justice -- our federal court system. these national security efforts are among the most important work we do. as we have learned -- in the most painful of ways -- our nation is at war with a determined enemy who seeks to strike at american interests -- and to harm our people -- both here and abroad. but we can defeat this enemy -- and we will do so without compromising the values that have made our nation great. indeed, it is only by upholding our most cherished and sacred

principles that we will ultimately be successful in this fight. second: we will protect americans from the violent crimes that have ravaged too many communities, devastated too many families, and stolen too many promising futures. one of the key ways we will strengthen violent crime prevention is by increasing our support for the law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line each day to keep our communities safe. although we can all be encouraged that violent crime rates are down nationwide, it is clear that more work remains to be done. in recent months, we have seen an alarming spike in officer fatalities and the number of line--of--duty law enforcement deaths. this is appalling and unacceptable. and it is why we will continue making investments to provide life--saving equipment, training, and information-- sharing capabilities to our

courageous men and women in the field. we also will invest in scientific research to make certain that this department is both tough and smart on crime, and that our decisions are economically sound. this means working closely with state, local, and tribal partners. it also means broadening our support for effective crime prevention, intervention, enforcement, and reentry strategies. by better understanding the cycle of violence -- and by applying targeted solutions at every phase of it -- we can stop and disrupt violent patterns. this work could not be more urgent. today, one in every 100 american adults is incarcerated -- and two--thirds of those who transition out of our jails and prisons eventually are rearrested. this is not acceptable. helping our young people avoid

lives of violence and crime -- and providing support to those who've served their time and are struggling to rejoin and contribute to their communities -- is not just a proven public safety approach. it is an economic imperative. and it is our moral obligation. effectively combating violent crime also demands that -- with the help and leadership of our u.s. attorneys' offices, as well as the fbi, atf, dea, and marshals service -- we continue to crack down on the gang--, gun--, and drug--fueled violence that menaces our streets and threatens our communities. through intelligence--driven, threat--based prosecutions -- we will focus on dismantling criminal organizations and putting them out of business for good. in so doing, we will fight to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and those who are not lawfully allowed to possess them. third: we will protect americans from the financial fraud that devastates consumers,

siphons taxpayer dollars, weakens our markets, and impedes our ongoing economic recovery. as we've seen, the impact of financial crime is not confined to wall street -- and many times the victims of fraud have worked hard and played by established investment rules, only to see their retirement and life savings vanish at hands of white--collar criminals. over the last two years, through reinforced interagency partnerships and new joint initiatives -- such as the financial fraud enforcement task force and the health care fraud prevention and enforcement action team -- we have transformed the way we deal with fraud crimes. not only have we secured record recoveries totaling billions of dollars, we have raised awareness about these crimes and improved the ability of consumers and victims to report suspected fraud schemes. in the coming months, we must take all of these efforts to the next level.

we will vigorously investigate financial crimes and ensure that those who commit them are made to pay the price -- by serving long sentences and making restitution to taxpayers, as well as victims. to identify the most effective ways to prevent and combat financial fraud, senior department leaders will continue to meet with victims, medical providers, business leaders, and key government and law enforcement partners around the country. we will also work to bring our heat task forces to new problem areas, and to expand other successful programs that will allow us to maximize both our efficiency and our impact. finally, we will protect those most in need of our help -- our children, the elderly, victims of hate crimes, of human trafficking, and of exploitation -- and those who cannot speak out or stand up for themselves.

we will ensure that our children have healthy environments and safe places to live, to learn, and to play. we will protect our seniors from abuse and our young people from experiencing -- and witnessing -- violence. and we will enforce our civil rights laws to guarantee that -- in our workplaces and military bases; in our housing and lending markets; in voting booths, border areas, and boardrooms; in schools and in places of worship -- all americans are protected. in the critical days ahead, these four essential priorities -- protecting americans from national security threats, protecting americans from violent crime, protecting americans from financial fraud, and protecting the most vulnerable members of our society -- will guide our work. and they will shape our legacy. as we advance each of them, we will continue to act as

responsible stewards of precious taxpayer dollars. and we will look for new ways to align operations, maximize resources, and amplify our work by building and strengthening partnerships. nearly half a century ago, on this very day -- april 25, 1963 -- attorney general robert kennedy discussed the justice department's most critical -- and fundamental -- responsibility: to build "a better and a safer worlda world in which people will be free to realize their own talents and fulfill their own destiny." this is what each of us must do, as attorney general kennedy said, "when our time comes." this is our time. this is our moment. this is our chance to strengthen the great traditions of this department, to build on its most notable achievements, to honor the contributions of

those who have served before us, and to create a world that reflects our aspirations for future generations. in examining the long history of this department, it is clear that -- if we commit ourselves to it -- change is possible. improbable -- and once-- unimaginable -- advancements are possible. and even the largest and most persistent obstacles can be overcome. what endures -- what matters most -- is the work before us. the work we do for the people we serve. the work that is our great privilege, our urgent and worthy calling, our once--in--a-- lifetime opportunity. so, let us recommit ourselves to this work. let us make the most of the opportunities now before us. and let us distinguish this era of the department's history as yet another great age of accomplishment and progress.

thank you all for your contributions to what we have -- and what we will -- accomplish. i am grateful to each of you. i am proud of each of you. and, like our fellow americans, i am counting on each and every one of you. let us leave this great hall today committed -- every day -- to making our nation a place that is both more secure and more just. our challenges are significant, and our tasks numerous, but our capacity to do great things is evident. we can do these things if we make this moment -- and this future -- our own. so let us begin. thank you.

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011]