for example, marijuana regulation, where you're seeing the conflict between chaos and order. even subsidies. some libertarians say the labor market is not inclusive enough. minimum wage might not be the way to do it but wage subsidies might make it more inclusive. i think conservatives need to feel more comfortable acknowledging that they are not libertarians and i think investing in parenting is one part of that puzzle. >> i want to hit on the theme of paternalism. paternalistic.is schools are paternalistic. nurse-family partnerships are paternalistic. as conservatives, are we comfortable with a certain level of public paternalism? >> heart of what has happened in the last few years is a change of ourown understanding fairly recent history.

you say welfare reform, which is what everybody talks about first when they talk about conservative public policy. it was very put -- it was very paternalistic. it was also very decentralized. comfortables are with paternalism when it is relatively local and can be defined differently in different places. even if there is sentinel -- even if there is centralized funding behind it. there's certainly room for that to help people with family formation and with other concerns, but they are always going to work at the margins. it's true, there is some evidence that helping people with parenting skills works. it helps a little. it works better than marriage promotion, which does not really seem to do anything, but it only helps very little. if we talk about the ways in which capitalism does not seem to be working right now, capitalism requires a kind of notzen that it does

produce. i think we are seeing now what it looks like when we fail at least in some portions of society to produce that citizen. and you can't blame the people in these situations. you can't blame the larger society, at least not in the simple sense. this is the greatest of it all is the problem we have. am very much an optimist about america but on the matter of how to help people in those situations, i don't think anyone has any idea. capitalism requires a kind of citizen it does not produce. very well put. libertarians are pretty comfortable with paternalism aimed at children. treat kids like kids. i'm good with that. i will also say that there is public policy and wages -- when you talk to people who study marriage, a lot of them talk about the fact that the wage situation is such right now that

men cannot get steady work for 50 weeks out of the year that pays anything and therefore they are not any use around the house. does marriage promotion work? no, but there are broader public policies where you can try to do things that make it easier to form an intact family. things like early childhood education, i don't know if you can actually scale it. i think harry preschools do a good job. i am not convinced you can reproduce perry preschools for 4 million kids a year. a partnership, even if it does a little, is better than nothing for kids who have very little. >> i think it's right that you want to try these things on a decentralized basis. things that involve complex delivery are better off being done by local governments. that i think doing this with a decentralized model depends on

having a centralized fiscal policy layer on top of it. it's one thing to say we're going to do parenting classes and various other things to try to improve outcomes for kids and families. it's another to say we are to do this and then we can cut the food stamp program. i also just because of the separate approaches with their own merits that can be done together, it's really important to pair those two things. >> thank you. if you don't mind, i'd like to brick bring -- i'd like to bring the discussion from 30,000 feet down to ground level. you have mentioned that it is important to create the citizen for the appropriate scales for the new age. i would put to you that any candidate, democrat or

epublican, who can address the problem of having the right worker, the right employee, would get everyone's vote. let me give you an example. the president of the national association of manufacturers said that at any one time there are two million manufacturing jobs openings that are going unfilled because of a skills gap. why is that? certainly throwing more money at the education system is not going to close that. so we need a set of policies that closes that skills gap and cements the workers' stake in the system by giving him and her those skills that are marketable nd are sought after.

right now manufacturing is 12% of the company. if it can be raised to 15% of the economy, we would have the same level of employment in the manufacturing sector as we had in 1980. now, will we go back to 1946, hell no, that will never happen. but there are -- so the question is, who can help create the kind of policies that will create a closure of the skills gap, to create the employee that is ought after by the new cap tal -- capitalist economy? >> there are a couple of questions in that. and all of them are framed from the point of view of an employer in a way that's interesting. that's useful but i think is also probably too often the way conservatives think about questions like this. i would say it's certainly true that our education system -- the education system of any public

that takes it seriously is always going to face the challenge of balancing it self -- its self-understanding. is your role to create a citizen that is capable of self-government or the worker your economy needs? the answer is both but the way to balance those, the way to distinguish between what is universal education and what is specialized education for what's needed here and now is a challenge for our education system. we at this point are probably not doing either of those things very well and our education system is not great. for many people it's fine. for some people it's absolutely dreadful. from the point of view of employers, it seems to have all the wrong priorities. i think that requires some changes in the way we think about the distinction between higher ed and secondary education. the distinction between worker training and education. those things have got to be -- have got to answer needs that bubble up from the bottom. as you're suggesting. so they've got to be a little more flexible, they've got to be capable of offering people more

options, i think there's a lot of room for improvements in the way that our public education system works and the education in general works. i think it's a low-ranging fruit for public policy. there are a lot of low hanging fruits for public policy. there are a lot of places where the inefficiency of the systems that we have is so great and their inability to deal with problems that are perfectly obvious is so great that you can really improve things quite a bit in a lot of areas. education certainly is one of them. i think thinking about it in terms of worker training is one obvious way to do it. we do have to be careful it's not the only way to do it, because it's not the only problem with our education system. >> i want to jump on this just briefly. my personal view is that the real problem is that you have corporations that have very high profits right now, you have corporations sitting on enormous reserves of cash and why is that? that's because they're not afraid. i think when you look at economic secters in which firms are afraid that their advantage is going to evaporate, that some

new startup is going to come and destroy them, those are the firms that are hiring. facebook started out as a relatively small company. they're hiring quite a lot. they're never going to become as big as g.m. but they're hiring a lot. they're paying higher and higher wages to the people who have skills and that in itself is creating a dynamic in which people are seeking to build those skills. when you look at the corporate tax code, the way it rewards large incumbents, if you look at all kinds of aspects that we treat business enterprises, we are not creating an environment in which these firms are afraid. it's perfect to have a safety net for citizens. it's not appropriate to have a safety net for corporations. i think an environment in which more corporations are afraid of business model innovation, i think that would actually be very good and would be particularly good for workers. >> i lsm never disagree with reihan but i have to here. corporations are sitting on cash because of political and economic uncertainty. they're concerned about higher taxes, regulations can drive up the cost of their business, cost f capital.

>> let's get some more questions here. >> mike with the manhattan institute. we talked about cities, we talked about conservatives being -- needing a national movement. in order to be a national movement we need to compete in cities. that's how we move senate races and certainly eventually presidential races. and we have the examples. we have right here in new york, indianapolis, reforms on public labor and certainly most recently public safety. but we lose cities. so my question is why? is it messaging? do we need a new agenda? many of you would say that we are kind of solving the problems of a decade or two decades ago. but i think in cities we're solving today's problems but we're not getting better. what do we need to do? >> in 2008 when obama was elected, i actually looked at this problem and thought, ok, is

this true in other advanced economies? where the cities always vote left and the rural areas always vote right? and it turns out in europe there isn't a clear pattern. in some european countries the cities are actually more politically conservative than the rural areas and there are maybe a lot of different reasons for that. but that gives me hope that there isn't any inherent -- anything inherent about urban life that necessarily means people must vote more left than rural people. but i do think it's a huge problem and something we need to address and we have to be willing to compete in areas where there isn't a short-term payoff. that's the hardest thing about the political cycle. is the short-term payoff leads us to cultivate the voters that we can win in the near term and that leads people away from ities. >> thank you for being here today. this has been a very interesting panel discussion. i wanted to ask about education but you touched on that. i want to ask about foreign policy. it doesn't translate into a lot

of votes but it's something that's obviously very important. the bush years could be described briefly as perhaps overreach. and now you can say that a conservative critique of obama might be that we withdraw too much and it allows a vacuum for strong men like putin. what would be the conservative response, what would be your response, your policy prescriptions for what's going on in the world right now, particularly in ukraine and syria and how you guys would think about handling that? >> i doubt we can touch on all of those things. but this is an area where the panel is pretty divided. joe sonally believe that has this -- he said in the 1990's i think it was, securities like oxygen, you only notice when it's vanished. i personally think that u.s. global leadership, i think it's extremely important in undergirding much of the rice of

global prosperity we've seen. i do think it's fair to say there was overreach during the bush years but it's very important that we invest and i think the problem is that the investing in our capabilities, the benefits of that are not always clearly visible. i also think it's true that the problem is that there are big swaps at the national security state that are ok. it's hard to tell. it's hard to have a coherent cost-benefit analysis. there are real structural problems and we might want to shift resources. but do i think there's a dangerous tendency on the right to give short drift to the importance of american power undergirding global stability but this is not a popular view. least of all among younger conservatives. >> foreign policy is important but it's not going to be important in the political debates of the next decade or decade and a half. i think -- we've had very little recent time where we've sort of had a normal political environment on foreign policy because we had the cold war and then september 11. got for nk the best we

where foreign policy is going to sit in american politics was the period from 1990 to 2001 where it was not salient. you can see that in the way conservatives talk now about the obama foreign policies. they try to find points to sort of harp on where the president is seen as weak. i think that's behind the obsession with the benghazi attack. i think there was also a very telling statement from marco rubio about syria, when we were -- when the president was waffling about whether we were going to intervene this and rubio took up a position where he wasn't sure if he was for or against an attack in syria but he was against whatever the president was for. and so i think i don't know what kind of foreign policy a republican president will enact if elected. george w. bush ran things that he was going to have a humbler foreign policy and then september 11 happened and directions changed. i don't think that's going to be a key driver of elections.

>> hi. first, thank you, everyone and moderator, for hosting a really interesting discussion. i have a question about health care. 'm directing it toward josh. toward the end of the discussion you suggested the decentralization of service delivery as superior. there is a segment of the health care complex called home health agencies and they take patients in a recoup are ative and retabletative phase and bring them home and it suggests much higher outcome, much cheaper delivery. the affordable care act has almost destroyed the industry. it's led to major reimbursement cuts over a multiple last two, three, four years. do you see this vis-a-vis the left-right divide, given there's a superior outcome with it, as

something conservatives can reintroduce, repackage, rebrand and sell in the health care complex for superior outcomes? >> i think the interesting thing that we've seen or an interesting thing we've seen with the implementation of obamacare is i think to an extent it's been a driver of innovation among providers because they're faced with these reimbursement rate cuts. there's been a real drive in the industry to find ways to contain costs. we've seen i think a slowing in health care expenditure over the last couple of years. and so actually the government turning off those taps to an extent -- and remember, it's not like we had a private health care system before obamacare. we already had the government incurring about half the expenses. so by paying less i think that can be a driver of a kind of decentralized innovation. where the government basically is saying, we're going to pay less. you figure out how to do it with less money. that's not the same as -- that's not to say it's going to work everywhere. if you cut reimbursement rates too much you're just going end

to up with scarcity of care. although i would note that among the somewhat disappointing findings from the oregon health study, we found people were consuming substantially more health care if they had medicaid which suggests that barriers to access due to low reimbursement rates were not as large of a problem as people on the right sometimes say. you don't want the federal government going in and telling health care providers exactly how to do their jobs. but i do think that centralized fiscal policies can be a driver of decentralized outcomes about service delivery. >> it's very simple. give consumers control of their own health dollars. then all of these things, whether it's home health care, retainer-based primary care, a lot of this stuff will automatically happen. why? because if the consumer is controlling the dollars, then the industry works for who pays them. today it's the government and third parties that pay the deliverers of health care services so the person who is important in that system is the

payer, not the patient. if the patient is controlling the dollars then the system magically works to serve the patient. and that's actually -- i resist this call for conservative from a termism because i think the opposite is what we need. we need to actually restrict the doing the government's but actually give people the money. so if we're concerned people don't have the means to afford certain services or support themselves in a certain way, that doesn't mean have some complex government program that tells them what to do. give them the economic resources to pursue the people who would deliver those services directly. >> the point that josh finished with, which i very much agree with, in a certain way the home health care question is one that shows the problem of both sites. the system we had before obamacare and the system we have now. in the bush years there was huge pressure to increase investment in home -- in all forms of home-based health care. which was also a sort of centralized decision about how the system should work.

it didn't work very well. it was probably an enormous waste of money. and now we're doing the reverse and saying, well, let's have a centralized decision that says, no, we don't do that. neither of these is the right approach. the medicare system we have, and really the larger health care system we've had before, was not consumer-centered, market-oriented system. that's the direction that conservatives need to move in. >> some of this sounds very familiar to me. the pessimism i'm hearing was very similar to the pessimism of the late carter years and i was with the reagan administration. it was amazing how quickly things turned around. and i think some of the 1980's solutions are still there. i think problems of regulation, obamacare has messed up the

medical markets but it's also messed up the labor markets tremendously. financial regulation, just today there was a report on a large number of new species being declared endangered. i think all these -- everywhere we look the economy -- [inaudible] and i think that's a lot of the unemployment we're seeing goes back to your mill worker. why does he have trouble finding a job in maybe because employers won't commit to hiring because they don't know what kind of health care expenses he's going to generate in the future. so i think to the extent, if we could deregulate some of these things, we might be able to move away from many of these problems. >> i agree, but it's also true that the policy challenges of today are very different than the challenges -- policy challenges of 1970. just look at the tax rates in 1978 remember us is the tax rates of today. regulation is a much, much bigger problem than it was then.

so we have to have an agenda that is tailored to the challenges of today. >> you guys talked about how there's no republican plan to deal with decentralization in civil society. but i'd argue that the ryan plan was conceptually about that. it was about privatization and voucherization which would decentralize from the federal government and a large amount of spending consults which would allow civil society to flourish. that program seemed very popular with republicans and very, very unpopular with the public. so i'm curious if you think these sound like good concept bus if in practice they're going to be too to volatile and unpopular? >> almost no voters care about decentralization as such. so you can't build the message around that. nobody goes into the voting booth and says, do i want a government and society that is more central or less central? they care about more fundamental pocketbook issues.

but the ryan plan thing goes to a distinction that i mentioned earlier. you want to decentralize certain kinds of deliveries because of the value of local knowledge, you have different preferences in different areas. bureaucrats who work for local governments are more likely to be in touch with local people or who work with nonprofits than people who work for the central government. but that doesn't mean you have to decentralize the actual fiscal flows where the federal government has a significant advantage in its ability to tax and borrow. if you commit to having those decentralized, it gives you more flexibility to centralize our -- other things. this is not just a backdoorway to slash the welfare state and reduce real incomes for people. >> there is a problem that republicans are going to have to deal with. you may have noticed obamacare wasn't popular, still isn't. most things that are actually fiscally feasible are wildly

unpopular. people like free stuff that is paid for by some other person they've never met. it has never been more true than it is today because we have an aging population that is very conservative about keeping what it has gotten and because there's less money. with lower growth you face much harder fiscal tradeoffs. you can't take it out of surplus. you have to take it out of something that people already have. i think this is going to be a big challenge for republicans as they frame an agenda which is that if you're going to be honest about what it's going to cost and how you're going to do this and who the losers are going to be, because there is no such thing as a policy in which someone is not worse off, then you're going to have to go out and say that. and be credible. that is going to make those people very upset. > democrats can do that.

>> i think the problem is that it takes us 40 minutes and a future of conservative -- conservatism talk to mention nything about social issues. we lose people flat-out because we have this bloodletting of state by state gay marriage, yes or no. so is there some kind of way that we can avoid a possible skis much of northeast republicans who frankly this issue is settle, right? all of us have gay friends, we're fine with it. but for southern republicans, how do we keep them from going off and causing a schism and running away with todd akin and pat robinson? >> i think even in the south, young republicans have your views on the social issues. so i think this is a generational transition that's going on on both the right and the left that perhaps won't be

as substantial of a schismatic issue in the future. but i think that's sort of the political element of it. i actually wish and hope that conservatives would have a coherent political philosophy around what they think culture and society should look like that would accept the post-1960's reality, the world we live in. >> a couple questions from social media. but i'm going to jump in. the republican party is a pro-life party. it never will not be a pro-life party it. would die without being a pro-life party. i just have to say that. i'm not a pro-life person. i'm just pointing out the reality. >> there's no generational shift on abortion. >> i carve out abortion from the other social issues. >> this is a question from one of our twitter followers who is watching. it comes and he'd like to know, why not define debt ceiling to e the ratio of debt to g.d.p.?

>> the fundamental problem -- this is just a general thing. people believe if they could only come up with some great rule, they could stop people from doing stuff they don't like. we just have to -- first of all, you can never get the rule because the other side understands what you're doing. they're like, no, you can't have the rule. the second problem with this specific thing is that there's always going to be an outstanding emergency. we declare war on iceland once a year and then we give them a plan and we've gone right back. there's always ways to gimmick these budget rules. our job is to tell politicians no, don't borrow any more money, cut spending and by the way, i really -- this is something i think the republican party really needs to do is say, when you spend money, that is borrowing it, ok? the decision to spend is the decision ultimately to borrow and then the decision to tax. and george bush totally elighted

the fact that when he spent money he was going to have to pay for that through taxation and obama has not even been interested in that discussion. on both sides, we need to understand that they're all the same thing and that trying to focus on the debt ceiling is a way to control that is not focusing on the fundamental problem which is the stuff we bought. >> this is not the biggest problem with that. the biggest problem with that is that the economic crisis in this country is massive unemployment and the fact that wage growth is anemic because the labor market is slack. and conservatives have become a movement of people who think that that is a less important issue than government debt even though interest rates are extremely low and capital is flowing into u.s. treasuries because of the market is strongly accepting of the fact that the u.s. government will pay those debts. if we continue to prioritize this debt issue over issues that are actually of economic importance to 58% of americans, we won't -- 85% of americans, we

won't be able to appeal with them. >> i disagree with this on two levels. interest rates are low. t just politically, people hate the debt. this is polled incredibly well. everyone hates borrowing money. do they act on that, no. are they totally hypocritical and irrational about it, yes. but is this political problem for republicans? no, i think this is something that actually when they go out and talk about it, polled extremely well and does them good at the ballot box. >> it's a profound economic problem. the most profound economic problem. >> a conservative is somebody who thinks every market is efficient except the treasury bond market. [laughter] >> we want to have a debate about monetary policy and what they are, that's fine. but let me tell you. in 2040 when we're paying more in interest payments than we collect in tax revenue and china has twice the g.d.p. than we do, you'll be very concerned about the price of u.s. treasuries. >> we've got one minute left. and i'm just going to ask you

one quick informational question. since you're all young hipsters. [laughter] what's the most conservative macklemore song? no. i want you each to name either a politician or a writer who if you had to pick someone to have a profound impact on the future of conservatism/the republican party, pick a person presumably not yourself. [laughter] >> i'm willing to say i will probably be the least influential writer on the republican party like ever. all of my ideas are basically electoral death. but -- david brooks. very much. [laughter] >> credibility shot. >> one person who gives me hope at this point is mike lee. who is first of all a senator who doesn't think he's running for president which is just a wonderful thing in american life and very rare. but he's also a person who is shaping a conservative vision

that makes lot of sense to me and i think it would make a lot of sense to a lot of people. >> i think the most important policy innovation coming from conservative politicians right now is on criminal justice. and revisiting the idea that it is a good idea to massively incarcerate people, especially for nonviolent crime. i think there are a number of southern governors who have been doing good things on that, including mississippi and ouisiana and north carolina. >> i would say that the most influential writer or politician that we will have in this generation will be the one who makes conservatism accepting of modern society and modern social issues, again leaving abortion aside. maybe that's a politician, maybe it's a writer, we'll have to see. but that person has not yet emerged. >> jim, a gentleman of the manhattan institute, is a guy who is always going to be a niche product. he's not always going to capture the hearts of the massive but

he's a guy who really gets the idea that markets are fundamentally about decentralized trial and error. they're actually really important. and that the right really ought to be the party of experimentation. and i encourage everyone in this room and everyone watching to read him. >> he's had some major pieces. >> he's got a lead piece in the next "national affairs." >> thank you for that. >> thank you very much, guys. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute]

>> this week we are presenting five of the supreme court's notable oral arguments this session. tonight it is a case involving employee stock options. we will have that for you at 6:55 eastern on c-span. 2014ht at 8:00, a look at and 2016 political predictions. :00, a focus on conservatism and that conservative movement. the gilded age of

new york city. here is a preview. >> but people who tell you they think they know what is going to happen in 2016 really are smoking something that is now legal it here in colorado. [laughter] there are some clues. there are some clues, and we have what i now am going to officially dub the sheldon ailes and primary, and it was held a few weeks ago in las vegas. and you can tell by who chose to participate in that primary who is looking, not necessarily who is favored, looking at 2016. these are people who went to a form sponsored by the world's eight richest men, sheldon adelson, whose principal

israel ande two -- the prevention of internet gambling, which will of course cut into the fact that he is the man,'s eight richest based on casino gambling in las vegas and macau. the people who went to see him in las vegas included a man you may have heard of, chris christie, the governor of new jersey. news abeen out of the lot lately, but i want to remind you he is the governor of new jersey, it includes part of the george washington bridge. [laughter] of the george washington bridge, as my good friend points out. not the new york cap, which has behaved better. a number of other people, went to participate in the adelson primary. they included scott walker, the governor of wisconsin. kasich, thed john

governor of ohio. they did not go because they needed a trip to las vegas, and scott walker did not explain what the hebrew pronunciation of his son's name is because he was on interest in sheldon adelson's support. that is what we call shameless pandering, which was what was going on in las vegas. they understood that this was, as was the case four years ago when people aim to visit donald , if theyat they needed were seeking the republican nomination for president three years hence that they needed sheldon adelson's support. of the conference program on political predictions. you can see that tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span.

>> it is now my privilege to present the gavel of the united states house of representatives to the first woman speaker in our history, the gentlelady from elosi.rnia, nancy p [cheers]

>> thank you, mr. boehner. thank you. thank you, my colleagues. thank you, my colleagues, and thank you, leader boehner, mr. speaker, mr. speaker. i accept this gavel in the spirit of partnership, not partisanship, and i look forward to working -- i look forward to working with you, mr. boehner, and the republicans in the congress for the good of the american people. more highlights from 35

years of house for coverage on her facebook page. c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you today as a public service by your local cable or television satellite provider. 50 organization sponsored the secretsources and conference. up next, a discussion of the difficulties reporters days covering national issues, moderated by bob woodward of "the washington post."

>> do we get a cold start here? i am bob woodward, from "the washington post." let me introduce the panel. first, jane mayer, whom i have known forever it seems, worked at "the wall street journal," "the new yorker" for almost 20 years. astonishing. many journalism honors, especially for your 2008 look "the dark side." that is one of those titles where you know where you are coming from.

we have robert dietz, a distinguished professor of public policy at george mason. he has been the consigliari to the intelligence community. did you work for dulles or not? the first cia director. he was general counsel to the nsa for eight years. amazing. he then was the counselor to the cia director general hayden for three years. he has worked in defense department, state department, and was unbelievably a law clerk to justice william o. douglas, one of the great civil libertarians. we would get to the question of what douglas would think of your career path. mark mazzetti of "the new york times." he has worked for "l.a. times," earned an award for his work in afghanistan and pakistan.

i will say this from the point of view from "the washington post," covers the senate and intelligence committee better than anyone. next to him at the end is peter maass, who writes for first look media. done a number of books, including the book "love they neighbor" on the war in bosnia. do not hesitate to interrupt. i will do the same, if that is ok. our topic is the perils of covering national security. i think we will start with jane and go around. what are the perils of covering national security?

>> i think it has become harder, in that i think our sources are under more pressure than they used to be. i've had a source in particular, during the bush years who was under investigation by the justice department for violating national security and for having spoken to me. my phone number appeared on his cell phone apparently, and it ruined his life for quite a while. it was very expensive for him to get legal counsel. >> do we know who this is? >> i do not think i should identify him, but he was falsely accused and later cleared. the point was during that period, the cliché of what happens to the press in such situations, that it had a chilling effect, it was frozen. he could not speak, i could not speak to him, i was toxic to others -- >> this was during the bush

administration. >> this was during the bush years. i do not think it has loosened up a lot since, but when there are more legal risks for sources, there is not a clear dividing line between the sources and the journalism that comes from them. it becomes an issue for the reporters as well. we get people in trouble by interviewing them and we do not mean to -- >> when we do not need to? >> when we do not mean to. we get them in trouble, we cannot guarantee that we cannot put them out of legal risk. >> so is it tougher now? >> i think it is, for sure. >> bob dietz. >> inevitably, in conferences

like this, there is a lot of talk about the risks that reporters undertake, editors undertake reporting the news. of course, the first amendment makes clear that news is important to the american people. the trouble i have is, while that goal, that role is very important, the government also has an important goal, and that is to keep the american people safe. what we are talking about here with national security leaks, we are not talking about leaks from the fda or department of agriculture, we are talking about leaks that may, in some circumstances, imperil the united states. between those two issues, the safety of the american people wins. i understand the important role the press plays, but stuff that is highly classified, provided to people who swear they will

not violate the confidentiality that has been provided to them, and then going ahead and leak it and the press publishes it, to me, they are imperiling -- >> have there been examples of things published, that have really endanger the american people? >> yes, i do. the principle is in the intelligence area the leak ends up being the harm. if something is leaked about a new military capability, that is serious, but the bad guys still have to figure out how to counter that new weapons system or defense. in the intelligence area, when you leak information about how information was acquired, the bad guys immediately know to stop using the means of communication. that is, i think, very risky.

>> do you have an example? >> i think the leak involving that special nsa program during the bush years was very damaging. >> in what way? you were there at the nsa at that time. >> yes. i was told -- and i think i was told responsibly -- that you would get a stream of data and then all of a sudden it would stop and you would see a correlation. it was not like somebody said, they are on to us. you would get intercepts, and then they would stop, and you would see the correlation between the leak and the stopping of the communication. >> mark, what do you think is the main peril of covering intelligence security? >> i agree with a lot what jane said. i do not think it is harder to

do this kind of reporting. it is not only the crackdown that has taken place on laekers and the number of investigations that create this climate that jane talked about. also, in the wake of the revelations about surveillance last year, has created this perception among the people that surveillance is everywhere and that everything is being watched. a similar experience to jane, you have people who you have developed relationships with over the years who will not talk anymore because they are concerned. people who otherwise may have been on the fence, who had never dealt with reporters, who might be inclined to do it, maybe second-guess it and think, what is in it for me to do this? you have phone calls -- people ironically talking, if anyone is listening to this call -- now people without any irony

will say, to whoever is listening to this call, i am not listening to classified -- it is accepted that somebody is listening to this phone call. >> do you think they are? >> possibly. over the last year, whether it is people listening to my calls or my sources, i think, increasingly, we have to be under suspicion -- >> but you are still able to function and work. >> definitely. you have to be more careful, certainly, about electronic communication, phone calls. it is less efficient, i suppose. especially at a daily paper that can be hard. >> so how do you communicate, do you move the flowerpot? >> you meet in parking garages. you try to have more first-person meetings. >> but to set those up?

>> it is hard. you have to set them up by some means. there are people who go into encrypted communications now. if you do that, both sides have to be doing it. the concern is, when you are a reporter, and you want to get somebody to be comfortable and talk to you, and you have never met the person, the first person you say is, i want to talk to you, and you have to use this phone, otherwise you are going to go to jail. who is going to want to talk? >> do you use encrypted communication? >> i do not know how much i should say, but yes. it is more recent. >> you are talking to somebody for the first time, or the 20th time, and you say, let's go encrypted, aren't they smart enough to realize that automatically that is an admission that there is some

sort of transaction going on that people are surveilling? if they find out x, y, and z have established encrypted communications with intelligence reporter for "the new york times," that is semi incriminating, right, mr. dietz? >> yes. >> maybe we are just talking about sports. >> what is the main peril here? >> i would respectfully disagree with what bob said here about leaks being the harm. in many cases, the lack of leaks is the harm. if there were more in 2002, 2003 about the intelligence upon

which those decisions were made, our national security would have been better rather than harmed. that is a basic point that we can talk more about perhaps. it is more difficult for everyone up here, people in the in the audience, people who are watching. one example i can give is, a number of months ago, somebody contacted me through a friend, had something that this person wanted to talk about relating to iraq. it was not monumental but interesting. i said to this person, ok. we were talking not through phones that could be traced to me at least. don't send it to me by e-mail. print it out, and send it to me by mail. at this moment in time, i think mail is more secure than e-mail for certain things. this was a workaround, which did not work, because i never received this material. either it was intercepted or never sent. having to set up that security

operation, obviously affected the fact that this person did not provide the material. that is a tax in a way on this new era we are in. sources will not come forward. but i would say, on the other hand -- and that is why i do not like the framing of this in such a dirge-like way -- we as journalists, we are challenged with a challenging story, the stories of our lives. >> what is that story? >> challenges to the first and fourth amendment of the constitution, which involves a crackdown on journalists ourselves and our sources. i think we have this incredible role to play to expose what is going on, to try to prevent it from continuing to go on. most of my life, i covered overseas conflicts. i made my name in bosnia.

boy, there was a story that people here did not care much about, but it was also difficult to cover because it was hard to make people understand why it would affect this country and their lives. i could not make a very persuasive argument about that, but, boy, when you are talking about challenges to the first and fourth amendment of the constitution, you are talking about how our democracy exists, what the future of our children is as members of a free society. that is a much easier argument to make and a more important one than the slaughter of people in the balkans. i found myself as passionate about this story as i did about genocide in the balkans. >> what i was going to say is, what is hard, one of the things that is difficult from the standpoint of the press is the way that the national security

community sometimes defines what is protecting the american public. it is not as if the press is trying to harm the american public. we just define it as a stronger country when there is a free flow of ideas, when there is consent of the governed, because they understand that the programs are you are implementing in their name, and we feel even bad news, sometimes strengthens the country because the rest of the world just to see our transparency and accountability system. and so it is a larger framing of what national security is. but because of the way that the executive branch has a monopoly on defining what national security is, you get to put your own parameters around it and define us as outside of it sometimes. we are not trying to harm the country by writing these stories. in fact, i think most reporters

feel they are really helping by getting this information out to the voters. >> i accept most of what you said. i too agree that reporters are not out to undermine the country, but i'm also clear in my mind that reporters do not often understand why something can be harmful, or why certain things would be guarded. one of the arguments that is always dragged out in these kinds of meetings is the overclassification of materials. i accept that. i am sure they are. this is not caused generally by evil intentions. when people are writing reports, there are three different classification levels. most people put the default, top-secret. there ought to be a way to address that, for sure. >> ok, but reporters are not helpless in this. bob dietz, you are saying, reporters do not understand the implications of publishing some

of this stuff. as mark, peter, jane can testify, when you find out something, you go to the government and you engage in, let's be honest, a negotiation of sorts, and a listening -- like one of hillary clinton's listening tours -- you listen and you say what is the argument that this will cause harm? if you look at the snowden case, in my own newspaper, "the washington post," we have been extremely careful about what we publish, always going to the government, and the government making their case, and i think, erring on the side of, ok, the government says this, let's

listen, does it make sense. so there is a lot left out. you are kind of the adjusting -- you are kind of suggesting that the reporters are rushing in and reporting willy-nilly, but that is not the way it works. >> on any beat you cover, you will call for comments, you will go to the agency you are writing about. it is happening far more than it used to, where the government pushes back now to try to get you to not publish. i think we keep pretty high standards for what we would not publish, and there are different standards. if the government is making a case that this does specific harm to specific individuals, that is one thing. we listen to that seriously. if the argument, as was the case in many of the wikileaks arguments, was this is going to

be really embarrasing for us, the government, that is a lower standard. usually that is not a reason to not publish. >> and when you go to the government, you learn all kinds of things. first of all, you get a second or third source, if you can get them to validate what you have, which makes sleep much easier at night. and it is not just a matter of calling and saying, i want your one-sentence comment. it is meeting with people, having serious discussions. sometimes weeks or months go by before some of these stories are published. >> i think we are beginning to learn what bob woodward does. the inside story. >> well, but it just makes sense. i have been in the oval office, the seventh floor of the cia, and other places where people say, if you publish this -- recently, somebody said if you publish this, we could lose a war. that gets your attention and you listen very carefully.

>> i agree. pretty much everything i wrote in "the dark side" i ran by the authorities at the cia to make sure it was correct, which is incredibly important, and see, basically, if it would cause undue harm. we did not always agree, but at least i was able to weigh their arguments and see whether or not i thought it made sense. >> i do not think it is just a question of whether something is overclassified. we all agree that generally things are. i do not think there is a period in the country's history -- the entire wars are conducted in a classified manner. there were the wars of iraqi and afghanistan, but so much of it is intelligence, wars carried out clandestinely, and they are

still secret, even though they should not be, like the drone strikes. >> which by the way, they are not secret. >> but still technically >> but still technically classified. >> there are people in the government who will officially validate and discuss that. >> but after a strike they will not say this is what happened. some people would like that to happen. they think they would be able to explain it better. i just think, therefore, it has never been more important, because this is the conduct of the war, it is all secret, the national security reporters tell people what is going on. >> peter, what do you think of that, going to the government, here is what i understand happened, what do you say? >> that is a useful and generally necessary step. we have a story out this morning that i co-authored on the intercept of one of the first sites, which is about some nsa documents that relate to us by

snowden. >> summarize the story. >> that the nsa is hacking into the computers of system administrators who are not themselves suspected of doing anything wrong, but control computer systems that the nsa was to infiltrate. these are innocent people being targeted by the nsa because they have, as one of the documents said, the keys to the kingdom. in this case, we said, is there any harm involved in publishing this? the answer was no. so we have gone to them and asked. i would say, however, in terms of the usefulness of talking to officials, of course, but right now, i trust documents more than officials. these documents say a lot more and tell me a lot more -- >> and they are a potent tool when you go to the government and you say i have this document and it says the following. >> my personal feeling is, i'm

not using these as tools. i'm publishing them -- we are publishing them. the greatest tools or instruments. i think these documents operate best not as instruments in terms of leverage with government officials, but instruments to inform the public. >> not only as a tool, yes, publish them, but when you go in to see someone in the government and you say i have these notes of this meeting, i understand the following is occurring -- that gets their attention. >> but it does not necessarily get much truth out of them. >> sometimes it does. don't you find that to be the case? >> sometimes. i think the national security part of the government has a credibility problem at this point. when you look at cases like the case of tom drake, and nsa official former who was

prosecuted under the espionage act, facing potentially 35 years in prison. he is 57 years old -- whatever age he was at the time -- rest of his life in prison. the case fell apart. the reason was, it was complete overkill. the judge himself eventually threw most of it out. >> even general hayden said, publicly, that it was a case of prosecutorial overrule. >> as the panel quoted, the judge said it was unconscionable what happened to his life in that period. there were five documents that he was alleged with taking them are unauthorized. three of them have to do with a complaint that he had made to an inspector general and he was told to take the documents home. the other two, one was classified as plain office

items. the other was declassified three months after he was prosecuted for having it. eventually, the case ended up with him pleading to a misdemeanor. the idea that that could have been portrayed as a huge national security case under the espionage act, and that he could have faced potentially life in prison, suggests there is a judgment issue sometimes on these calls about what national security entails. >> bob dietz, how come that was not stopped earlier? >> i do not know. i know drake, some of the people he's dealt with, but i do not know the facts of the case. >> let me ask this general question, which i think is important. the earlier panel said quite directly that the obama administration is anti-press.

actually, it was said earlier that the effort to get jim from "the new york times" to testify is a persecution. do you think the obama administration is anti-press? peter? >> i wish you could've started with somebody else. >> [laughter] >> anti-press is a broad phrase. i would like to get away from that maybe. the specifics, how many have been prosecuted as leakers under the obama administration compared to previous administrations? the previous panel went over it and it is more than any other administration by several factors. that is rather concerning to me. what i was listening to in the previous panel, one of the persons -- people said there was that jim rising case, but that is really it.

yes, you do not need more than one case to make your message. that is the point of that case. that case is equivalent to 100 cases to me because the impact is the same. >> mark, do you think the obama administration is anti-press? >> like peter, i will punt that term. to answer your question, we have had trouble digging into what are the origins of this incredibly large number of investigations. >> they are not just investigations, they are prosecutions. >> tools available to the investigators are far better than they used to be, so prosecutors want to make cases, so they can be better than they used to be. that is part of it. at the very least, you see supervisors telling investigators not to go in certain directions.

at the very least, the aggressive prosecutors making their case against leakers are not being stopped. yet, some of these cases are holdovers from the bush administration. there are conscious decisions being made not to stop them. and that is, i think, where you see the continuity between bush and obama. >> bureaucratically, being realistic about the way the justice department works, people at the lower level start a case, they get very aggressive, and it is just like one of your editors at the "new york times" hesitating to tell you, don't pursue that story. it might appear that they are stopping you from a legitimate inquiry. so, up the chain, if you talk to these people, there is a lot of reluctance to stop it a read the difficulty is, they are not setting the policy at the very top and saying -- from my point

of view, i think they are harming themselves by either declaring or appearing to declare a war on the press. >> what frustrates me a little bit about the way this discussion is categorized -- my hypothesis, all of these cases involve somebody who committed a felony. >> maybe. >> prima facie case. just like the police investigate robberies and white-collar crimes and so forth, it is hard for me to understand the argument that says this felony should not be investigated. if you are trying to put together a case -- archie cox, the watergate prosecutor, until he was bounced, in one of his briefs, start out by saying, the grand jury is intended to every man's evidence.

he was quoting some british jurist. how is it that you put a line around this felony and do not worry about it, but pursue other felonies? >> so that every time a white house official gets some comment about classified drone strikes, isn't that a federal felony, too? >> i agree with your point, and every time i have been involved in these discussions, i point out how the official leaks makes the administration lose the high ground, for sure. it is so hard to explain rationally why a senior official can leak, but what happens at the gs15 level, the world is about to end. >> but that is a really big problem. in the earlier panel -- you cannot talk with people about

national security issues and not discuss classified information. that is just the reality. you know that. >> i agree with you. >> so the idea that these few cases where they seem to have evidence, and they pursue them with this zeal and these tools may have, somebody at the top -- and i think this is a commonsense solution to say -- come on, let's get real. >> in this case. >> is it really worth it? the idea that the obama administration -- do you think the obama administration is anti-press? >> i think every administration is anti-press. >> i have known some. >> some more than others. >> i think there is a continuity here.

>> is what the framers of the constitution understood. power has a certain tendency to make people want to hold onto power. leaks, particularly of unflattering information, are not welcome by people in power. the problem with the prosecutions, there is this sense that they are arbitrary because there are authorized leaks that are favorable and push one particular line, and then some that are unfavorable, and then prosecuted. so the question is, who gets to define and decide what the american public should hear about what the intelligence community is doing? should the intelligence community get to decide only? should the press get to decide also? and what do you do with dissidents in your ranks who are critics, who feel maybe what

they are seeing has crossed some lines, and is wrong, and they want to speak out about it? such an american act to sort of speak up in dissent. >> most people, not everyone, to use the legal term, bob dietz, admission against interest. if you can find people to talk to for a long time, they may say something that is against their interest that is true. just in the last 10 or so minutes, what is the remedy for the press, in terms of how we operate? is it to go in crete did -- encrypted? snowden told you, peter -- an amazing quote --unencrypted journalist communication is unforgivably reckless.

>> when encryption is required. not every communication i have requires encryption. not every relationship requires it. when it is required and you do not do it, it is reckless. >> what do you do as a reporter, mark, in this environment? what kind of frame of mind do you go into? now i have an excuse, i can tell my editors, i talked to six people and they all hung up on me. >> that sounds pretty good, actually. >> [laughter] >> as i said, a lot of it is less efficient. i think you have to be conscious of the security of your sources. you are entering into a trust. i think, when you are dealing with people who have been involved in government, as your sources, you are inclined to think, they know how to keep

themselves secure. they know better than i do the state of the surveillance. but i do not think that gets you off the hook. i think that means that you have to be very careful, increasingly careful, that it is not because of something that you have done that get your sources in trouble. >> i would also say this is not a big mystery to me. this thing that we all carry around, sometimes you do not carry it around. that is an important measure of protection and is easy to take. for a very long time, reporters managed to do well without these devices. >> i remember i talked to the first time to somebody who was an important position in the intelligence world and he got out his black hairy, and took out the battery. i thought, what the hell are you doing? he said, then they cannot listen.

>> i remember in 1999, when i was covering the balkans, during the milosevic era, cell phones had just entered society there. before any conversation about politics, you would not only take out the battery of your phone, but you would put it on the table, the phone and battery, not just to show that other person that the government was not listening, but that you are not recording their call with your phone. this was 1999. it is not so new in many ways. >> the question you asked a minute ago about what is the solution -- well, the solution is the american people. the american people, through their representatives, have decided that there are some things that are sufficiently important, that they ought not

to be discussed in the open press. there are plenty of ways of addressing that. you have the american people agreeing to a shield wall. that is not going to happen. i would be surprised if that ever happened. >> sometimes, the representatives of the people get it wrong. >> of course they do. >> we are on the outside. i do not buy that. i think part of the remedy is to be more aggressive, frankly. as a reporter. you have to work harder. i remember working on the fourth bush book i did, and there was a general who would not talk. e-mails, phone messages, intermediaries, nothing. so i found out where he lived, it was in the washington area. and when is the best time to visit a four-star general without an appointment? 8:00 p.m. on a tuesday, they will have eaten, are not in bed,

not getting close to friday, so i knock on the door. he opens the door and looks at me and says, are you still doing this shit? >> [laughter] >> and he meant it. he looked at me and just kind of had a disappointed look on his face, disappointed in himself and said, come on in. set for two hours, answered most of the questions, why? because i showed up. we do not show up enough. it is incredible, the drop-in visit -- if you are worried about security and so forth. i have been two books on the obama administration trying to understand, and i think there is a lot of ambivalence about the press, as there always is, and you can deal with them.

if you just show up and persist and you say i have got this, we can do our job. the tragedy of this is if we pack up and say, it is too hard. the snowden era and the prosecution era has created a new world for us. i think it is really kind of the old world. i started in this in the nixon era. you are not on their christmas card list. it always is tough. we should remember that. if you work eight hours a day, maybe you need to work 10 or 12. >> i have sat in cul-de-sacs, by curbs, waiting for people to come home. it was not the grand life that i thought it would be that "the new yorker."

>> and if you are honest with yourself, you probably do not sit on the curbs enough. >> i will say one thing from your standpoint, what i imagine would be your standpoint. i think the press needs, also, to make sure that when we do push hard and make our calls or something important enough to publish when the national security community says don't omit it really should be important enough to publish. we should think about something that serves public interest. not every secret is equal. just because you find it out does not mean you need to put it in the newspaper or the magazine. i feel, anyway, there has to be an important public purpose when you take that on. >> peter. >> following up on your point about sitting on curbs. it depends on who's curb you are

sitting on. generals have told you useful things, which is helpful for everyone. covering iraq and afghanistan, i have found, being with generals, colonels, lance corporal's, that actually the people whose doorsteps i sit on, the better ones are the lower levels. the generals i have talked to -- i had an off the record talk with petraeus. taking notes, thinking this was great. i looked at my notes afterwards and there was really nothing in there whatsoever. one of his geniuses. >> he is very good at that. >> and so is michael hayden, by the way. >> that happened again and again with the senior officers that i would talk with. whereas, when i was hanging out with the specialists, the lance corporal's, the captains, i was finding out a heck of a lot more

of what was really going on. >> but then you move up the food chain. i agree with you, sometimes the best sources are names that we never hear about and no one else knows, but then, if you are ultimately trying to write about decision making, you need to get to the generals and the white house or pentagon who are making these decisions, or the cia. >> i do not have the bob woodward special sauce to get that access. >> what gets people to respond is information. if you have the document or the notes or the details. if you go in and say, i understand you are launching operation pink starling tomorrow. pink starling is a protected code word. people will say, ok we will deal with this. >> actually, higher lever people may not know what that is. we are just talking about the

nsa. there are so many there, and they are so technical, i would be really surprised if the high-level people know the details more than a small number of the most major of programs. >> i think you could be wrong about that. i think so. many could not describe the engineering details, but i would be surprised if there were more than a handful of programs -- >> i suspect a handful, you are right. but impossible to count how many programs there are in the nsa. we could save thousands and probably more than that. i just imagine it is beyond the capacity of any individual to have significant knowledge about more than a handful of the thousands of programs. >> i agree with bob dietz, and i agree with you, but the answer is, work the low-level to

mid-level, and then the top, if you can. then you get a total universe portrait. we have a couple of minutes here before there is a coffee and martini break. maybe not martinis. dietz, you are the historian of this. what is going on here. when historians look back on this era, what will they say, the snowden era, prosecutors and of jim risen? >> i do not have an apocalyptic vision. unlike some members of the first panel, i do not in the west is about to end. civilization as we know it is disappearing. i think there are new challenges.

the tension that jane was describing between administrations and the press, -- i worked in the carter administration. the wailings that went on in there about the stuff in the newspapers. i do not think that stuff will ever end. i would like to mention one more thing, if i may. in these discussions, there is often a lot of talk, as peter did, reference to the fourth amendment. the supreme court has -- two cases that address fourth amendment issues in the criminal context that may touch on national security. they have always drawn a line between, on the one hand, domestic security, stuff that involves criminality in this country. on the other hand, dividing that from national security involving threats abroad. in the two major cases on this, the supreme court went out of their way to say we are not talking about foreign intelligence here, we are talking about domestic

intelligence. my experience at nsa is that line was rigorously drawn and observe. i think most reporters should rest easy about whether there will be an attack. i do not believe there is necessarily a fourth amendment rights when you are talking about conducting foreign intelligence. >> but most reporters who cover issues like terrorism, for instance, have many overseas own calls -- >> from terrorists? >> from as close as you can get to do reporting. they would try to get in there and understand what is going on. many reporters -- john miller, who has worked in and out of the government, was famous for going in and interviewing bin laden. is that a crime, should that have been eavesdropped on? >> if somebody is speaking with bin laden on the phone and we

are not picking it up, the head of nsa ought to be tossed. >> [laughter] >> but under nsa rules, if that was the case, if it were jane mayer, an american citizen, her name would have to be minimized. >> you are right. it would have to be minimized. and the minimization rules are religiously followed. >> i think we are done, thank you very much. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014]

>> a new story reported by the associated press this afternoon says the state department is giving federal agencies more time to review the keystone xl pipeline before deciding whether to issue a permit that could push the decision about the controversial pipeline until after mid term elections in november. the state citing a nebraska judge that overturned a state law that allowed the pipeline to pass through the state eerie the state department says that created uncertainty and ongoing litigation. there's ongoing reaction including this from senator mary landrieu, who chairs these and it energy and natural resources .ommittee in part, she says it amounts to nothing short of an indefinite delay. the decision is irresponsible, unnecessary, and irresponsible. she says, "i plan to use my power as chair of the committee to get this pipeline approved."

we will keep our eyes on the story and give you further updates as they become available. this week, we are showing five of the supreme court's notable arguments so far this session. tonight, a case dealing with companies that sell stock options to employees as retirement investment. we'll have that starting for you and 6:55 eastern. taking a look at some of our primetime programming, join us tonight at 8:00 eastern for a world affairs conference look at 2014 and 2016 political predictions. here's a quick preview. .> jeb bush you all want to know about. he is a longtime friend of mine. he is also my tenant. i saw him yesterday, in fact, at lunch -- >> was this in new hampshire, by any chance? lives in coral gables, florida, and i think -- i suspect that is part of what ,hapes his immigration views

the fact that it is an immigrant community, and a lot of times, the immigration debate can be about faceless government statistics. how many people cross the border ? how many children of undocumented are born here? it can be all about faceless numbers, but when you live in an immigrant community, when you speak spanish fluently, when you watch spanish tv, you know these stories, and you know that people's mothers, women who get raped by human smugglers when they are crossing the border, and risk their lives swimming across the river or taking a raft to the united states. and a lot of times, they leave children behind that they may not see for a decade. it's in the hope that they can and help and find work support the families and loved ones they left hind.

have they broken the law? absolutely. is it an act of love? i will tell you that it is not an act of love for those families. lives, the, where he stories he knows shapes some of that i do not think you have to read tea leaves when it comes to jeb, it is surprising, he pretty much told us what he is thinking and where his head is. ,e is a very disciplined guy and i think he is going to stick to his timeline even when it comes to his own internal decision-making process. he has said what his criteria is. it needs to be ok with his family, and i do not think that means mama bush, but the woman he has been married to for 40 years now and his children, what it is going to have on them.

running as a president today means doing it as a family. it affects the entire family's life and privacy. he says he wants to be able to do it joyfully. he wants to be able to offer a positive vision. he wants to be able to offer solutions. he has said he is going to sit down, think about it, over the summer, think about it later this year, and make a decision. the guy, i know him, he means what he says, and he says what he means. i do not think he is doing this -- we have gotten accustomed in politics to the art of the political piece, people who are trying to promote the sale of a book or maybe trying to get a gig on cable news, which is not a bad gig. [laughter] know, get themselves on "dancing with the stars." i do not think jeb bush needs

that, nor is it about that for him. he is a very serious guy who is ,oing very well businesswise who has got a fulfilled life, and so i think it is about that location to us ash but that location for service and is it the right thing for the his family and the country. >> that is from a program on political predictions tonight at 8:00 eastern right here on c-span. whether it is an award for good journalism as a politician, i declare an interest in not wanting to make a judgment on that. service,ard for public for possibly the greatest betrayal of our national secrets of all-time, strikes me as quite bizarre. i think there is a real danger of the very cozy media world patting itself on the back

without absolutely understanding the consequences or the dangers we face in a very dangerous world. i think there is a dangerous disconnect there. as for the guardian newspaper itself, my view was that if an individual gave the names of k.eratives outside the u. jurisdiction, that would the a breach of the terrorism act. why would that multiply to a newspaper? onthis weekend liam fox edward snowden, government surveillance programs, and privacy issues. saturday morning at 10:00 eastern. from texas, the san antonio book festival, including authors and panels on the stories that shape san antonio. and the nsa, big brother, and democracy, saturday at 1:00 p.m.

eastern on c-span2. tour thean history tv, national cryptologic museum and learned about secret codes and their role in history. sunday at 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. eastern on c-span3. years c-span5 brings public affairs events you,washington directly to putting you in the room at congressional hearings, white house events, retreats, conferences, and offering coverage of the u.s. house, all as a public service of private industry. we are c-span, treated by the cable industry 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. follow us on facebook or twitter. now it is the annual terry vanderbilture at university, given by mr. lewis,

the author of seven books. his speech from national about philanthropy, the humanities, and higher education is just over an hour. as a historian, you always wonder whether or not you want to lay with mythology. there is something very elegant about a story in that always is wrapped in some degree of truth and gets to be told and retold in different ways, and in some ways it is the mythologies that find communities. i will only correct one part of

the mythology. i did not go to the bathroom [laughter] it was a case where i was taken by surprise. the better part of the story is i actually went to brazil, and my colleagues, we were looking for a new president, and i missed the meeting. iearly i was in brazil and came back from that meeting and went into what i thought was a committee meeting, and it was the committee of the whole, and i was asked then to leave the room. then was invited back in and was told by my colleagues that they had the in my absence that perhaps i should consider a new opportunity that i had not been considering two minutes before. anyway, i am delighted to be here at danger built to be the president of the andrew w mellon foundation, to be in rooms where i now go everywhere and it is a beautiful thing when someone says i had a mellon philosophy at one point last year, even before i became a president and

president basic myth of the foundation i was giving a talk to the supreme court for black history month. at the end of the talk i walked into the core door -- corridor to remind me of where i was, and alive,my mother was because i was in the court, i was about to talk. as i was walking out the door, several people walked up and started to reminisce how the mellon fellowship it is some critical stage in their lives and made it possible for them to finish their graduate course of be faculty members all over the united states. when you realize what philanthropy can do, which is to invest in able people to capable institutions and get out of the way, you realize that perhaps that is the greatest gift when choices to be made. today i want to talk about the humanities and choices. without charts and

graphs, although you will hear numbers in what i have to say as i try to set a stage for why one should be speaking -- thinking about investing in the humanities at this particular point in time. 3/4 of a century ago, virginia woolf post a seemingly imponderable question. if you just have three guineas to share, what would you support? on theinterwar period cusp of a second great war, she wondered if investments in education, especially the education of women, promised relief from the follies of masculinity that combined with a fair's of the state and national pride to produce an unending cycle of warfare? woolf surmised that men learn from mandatory military service. she expressed hope and tender to believe that women as opposed to

learning in the professions could fashion a worldview that offered an alternative to testosterone-laced acts of aggression. more derived from socially reproduced ask of masculinity. -- acts of masculinity. in an age that claims millions of lives and destroys nations and ways of life, a preoccupation with alternatives makes perfect sense. much has changed on the global stage since the late 1930's. , but they appear more confined on the whole. excluding accept terrorism that explode beyond borders, they remain regional affairs these days. states, leading colleges and universities such as vanderbilt no longer worry

about what it means to admit qualified young women. routinely, 55% to 60% of the configured.ss is so rather there is talk of taking affirmative actions to ensure there are sufficient young men in the freshman class. gender diversity -- what if we play with the notion guineas,hree i equalednding a guinea a sterling pound. those three cents have transformative power. the three cents would be the only new investments that were available to sustain and advance humanities in the generation. if that was our charge and those

were our resources, how would we deploy them? what would be bet on? what would we invest in? what would we promote? talk about three cents in three sentences is an attempt to thoughtfully and perhaps provocatively suggest an answer. am successful, the top will catalyze -- the talk will catalyze a discussion about the role, the centrality, and the future of the humanities in the academies and the broader society. organizershank the for inviting me. i know several of the other listed whocarolyn are friends and colleagues, and i am humbled to be in the ws they create.

i also want to recognize the en centerf the warr and the role it has played in the context for new discoveries on the vanderbilt campus and i take pride in reflecting that the mellon foundation played a small role in helping to seed that activity. then to my fellow, thank you for the invitation and for the introduction and even the mythmaking that went along with it i want to thank all of you for creating a context and a venue for this cover station. three cents -- let me start with cent number one. why should philanthropy care about the state of humanities at all? in each age we face insurmountable challenges, ones that require choices to be made,

resources to be allocated, and areas to be ignored. this is more of a case in the united states, which has seen an explosion in the number of registered philanthropy or philanthropic organizations as well as a concomitant rethinking of what it means to be philanthropic. according to the foundation's center, there are 81,777 foundations and charitable organizations registered in the united states at this time. such ase notable ones gates, ford, robert wood johnson, and rockefeller, and they command billions of dollars of assets. there are also quite a few and a armle more than a turtle and their assets number in the thousands rather billions. to think about that ,777,ellation, 80 10001

there are older foundations that have been assisting with grants for more than a century and others that have emerged in the last decade with a hugely articulated vision about purpose , intent, and scope. if carnegie symbolized the perpetuity foundations whose boards, commissions, and goals changed over the decades, but endured, among the more subtle changes that have really given birth in the last few years is the creation of a number of sunset foundations. these sunset foundations gates, they aret designed to close before the death of a benefactor or in a specified number of years after his or her death. i do not know if you know that the gates foundation will

end after 20 years after the death of bill and melinda gates. means towhat it realize that you will sunset and how that may actually shape your next 30-plus this years. you can say 30-plus years actuarial you look at tables and look at bill and tried to figure out both the intersection between income and age, 30 years is a pretty good number. whether perpetuity or sunset foundations, the range of you men needs wanting support seemed endless. homelessness, economic inequality, and poverty, health care and disparities, mobile health issues, war, and social instability. yierney and political -- tyrann and political persecution.

headlining that this is the age for technology and math, stem, one might ask, why spend one penny on furthering the humanities? or stated more bluntly, what is the case for investment in the humanities at this particular point in time? the answer lies in understanding and articulating non-defensively the role the humanities play in educating citizens for a complex interconnected world. too often we are captured by headlines such as the one in "the new york times" in november worry.d colleges the piece was led with a focus ofstanford, noting that 45% the faculty in the stanford main undergraduate division are clustered in humanities, but only 15% of the students. hence, a worry and panic.

in a piece, we are told by admissionsdean's of at stanford and princeton to recruit students just for humanities. the assertion of a mere seven percent of college graduates major in humanities, down from a high of working percent in the 1970's. remember those numbers. my travels around the nation and across the atlantic have reinforced the need to craft a a humanist tons have a better command of the facts. i would use my first sense on seeking to develop a narrative about and for the humanities. in a nod to making such a case, the american cap academy of arts and sciences offered the which was published last summer. we live in a world characterized

by change and therefore a more humanities and social sciences. how do we understand and manage change we have no notion of the past? how do we understand ourselves if we have no notion of humanitd social sciences. how do we a society, culture, or world effort from the one in which we live, a fully balanced churchland, including the humanities and the social sciences, and natural subsidence is, provides opportunities for thinking and imagination, for creativity and discovery, and for good citizenship. humanities and social sciences are not merely electives, nor are they a leak or elitist. they go beyond the immediate and instrumental to help us understand the past and the future. they are necessary and required support in challenging times as well as in times of prosperity. they are critical to our pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness as described by the nation's

founders and they are the heart of the matter. that is the introduction to this report from the national academy. what steps are necessary therefore to assertively insinuate the humanities into a dialogue about the nation, any nation, and its future? the answer to that question, let's turn to the humanities themselves. perhaps the place to begin is with the narrative, that will beef your mail your the humanists. -- that will be familiar to humanists. what is the story we seek to tell? i've are from the id of an narrative offered where was concluded a narrative is more than a series of interconnected fact's. a story line, bound by events that leads to some notable action of consequence. take for instance the story of a demand for greater attention to stem.

in 1997, 1999, the reference was smet. stem, but to science, mathematics, entertaining, -- engineering, and technology. gun i s were think i appreciate to discuss the role of federal government in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology, smet education. we have a long history to sustain and improve our country's educational systems. or than a decade later, a professor of technology average unitech dutch at virginia tech noted in the 1990's the national science foundation used smet,

when there was a complaint that smet sounded too much like smut. as recently as 2003 relatively few knew what it meant. many that year asked that the stem education graduate program i was beginning to and vision had something to do with stem cell research. that was still much the same case in the fall of 2005 when we launched our stem education graduate program, and then he would go on. when america has learned the told was flat, they grew believe china and india were on course to bypass america in the global economy by outstemming us . stem mania set in.

now everyone seems somewhat familiar with the stem acronym. his account is about narrative and the structure of a story about the need to invest in stem. he gives credit to tom friedman. i would argue it was not just freedman who made them aware that all this aware, federal policy in the united states shifted, the national academy be an alarm into a series of publications, rising above the gathering storms, and perhaps most importantly the pace of technological change is example five by digital technologies redefined the sense of time and urgency. for those of us who were born in the 1940's, we think of a decade as lasting roughly 25 years. the new digital age, generations are defined in terms of 18 months.

if the typical undergraduate finishes colleges in four years, experienced 2.6 seven technological generations. it became the part of the narrative, which put stem into the national vocabulary with different meaning and implication for all of us. is there a lesson to be copied here? the answer is yes, beginning with the basic. what do we know about ourselves and humanities? let me ask you a question. how many of you know anything about humanities indicators project sponsored by the american academy of arts and sciences? three out of about 60, ok. is an attempt on the part of the american academy to begin to collate and come out ative data setit on issues related to the world of the humanities, academic, outlook, publications, job

placement, career choices, the ways in which students major in, what fields, etc., and i use authoritative, because coming out with one is what a person who used to head the research center in chicago, a one-time progress, he took on the project of creating these indicators, and it is important. if we begin with the number of students majoring in humanities, remember the story i referenced a few minutes go. two storylines emerge. the number of majors peaked in the early 1970's. it hit an all-time low by the early 1990's, and has been on a steady rebound ever since. how do i explain this? 141 thousand students majored in humanities fields. by 1981, the number was more like 70,000. interestingly, when you fast wasard to 2010, the number

120,000. so you end up seeing this roller coaster and the slope changes over time. what is the narrative that we begin to offer? the store is not last year or the year before, is at the all-time low, and there has been incredible change since 1981 the number ofd students who are majoring in literature, history, and languages. second, as a percentage of overall graduates, the humanities have always been somewhere between 8% and 12% of college graduates. while you can become enamored with the effect of the curve, it is clear that for the. of the mid-1960, until 1973 to the present, notwithstanding the to 12% ofhe data, 8% the total is what you see. until1987, the numbers

2010 was close to 10% to 12%. some piece of the narrative there beginning to command the details, to actually shape not only the importance, but understanding the range is very important. what is the take away? percentage of american undergraduates have chosen to major in fields of the humanities for a long time. why they do is a very consultative question about but is not driven by market imperative alone. that sense of stability notwithstanding the long -- daily by individual acts of individual institutions is important for i think. part of that story is being crafted. -- narrative i started with crisis and alum. we know from science research that on average humans make better decisions when they're fight-flight a

response. we should remember this when we begin to assemble the various elements of the narrative, not a story about the crisis of alarm, but a story about dynamic change over a long time and how do you begin to understand that and how do you begin to place it in context. what else can we glean from the indicators project that may help us craft our narrative? we can begin to see that humanities represent a range of intellectual areas and they have experienced growth of one kind or another over the years. 1990's to the late the mid-2000's, the number of academic jobs grew by 20,000 in the humanities nationwide. clusters, there has been real job growth. what we need to know is what percentage of those were in lecturers, what percentage

worked in labor, this is the future work of the humanities indicators project. but we take away from this is the fact that colleges and universities have always been places where there is new kinds of introduction and innovation and there is a way in which the fields of humanities have played a role in those institutions in a particular way for some time. humanities, i of draw your attention to a recently published book by a british scholar. it is entitled "the value of the vanities" he reminds us that the argument for the amenities should resist obvious traps. she sees no utility in opposing the humanities with the sciences or social sciences. i agree. argues that knowledge creation and sharing requires a multiplicity of approaches. more viable than

another intrinsically. rather, along or in combination, they offer another way of unraveling the mysteries of the human condition. she concludes that the humanities have public value for about five reasons. let me take them off. do a distinctive kind of work, preserve and extend distinctive kind of understandings, and possess a distinctive relation to the idea of knowledge being inextricable from human subjectivity. very important. two, their work is useful to define -- to society, and assist in the reservation and duration of the culture. three, the humanities make a vital contribution in individual happiness and to the happiness of large groups. some people may debate that one, but i think it is there. fourth, the humanities can make a vital contribution to the maintenance of a health of a

democracy to the ability to actually make sure people actually ask questions and know how to read and interrogate the evidence before them. and five, she concludes, none of these arguments is sufficient without a supporting claim that practices, the humanities study and the kind of scholarship they cultivate have value for their own sake. that they are that they are good in themselves. it is not just because they are traditionally utilitarian. they are good in their own way. the searches will no doubt be debated in the u.k. and the u.s., but crafting a compelling narrative will undoubtedly produce a need to be as concerned with what the humanities will become as well as what they have been. let me go to the next period. would be spent on evidence-bas n