tavis: good evening. from los angeles, i am tavis smiley. tonight, a conversation with former u.s. secretary of state colin powell. the four-star general has a new book, which focuses on lessons he learned along the way about life in leadership. the book is called "it worked for me." we will talk about american wars abroad, the crisis in syria, off and the 2012 presidential race, of course. we are pleased to could join us. a conversation with colin powell, coming up. >> every community has a martin luther king boulevard. it's the cornerstone we all know. it's not just a street or boulevard, but a place where walmart stands together with your community to make every day better. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like

you. thank you. tavis: i am honored to welcome colin powell back to this program, the former secretary of statand decorated four-star general. he is a best-selling author, whose new book is called "it worked for me, in life and leadership." secretary colin powell, good to have you back. >> good to be with you again. tavis: i plan to get to the book, but i might want to pick your brain about a few things. let me start with an item in

the news it, that you have not decided as yet, unless you want to break some news tonight, about who to support in the presidential election. let me ask them in tandem and let you get them out of the way. the first question, do you tend to -- intend to endorse, and if so, what are you looking at for that decision? >> well, i am a private citizen on a book tour, not a political tour, so i do not get any need to endorse anyone. as i have done every election since i started voting, i always like to take my time to look at the two candidates and not only look at them but the policies they will bring in, the people they might bring in, whom they made a point to the supreme court, and look at those items before i make a decision, and if there is a need for me to say something, i will do so, as i did in 2008. but i am under no pressure from

the system to say anything at this point, and i am just going to keep looking and watching. tavis: you talked about the decision you had to make years ago about not running for president. the decision right now. let me ask you some questions about the current president though, one about domestic policy and one about foreign policy, and then we will move on. president obama has used more drones than president bush did. we know that there were two programs that he continued. he has not just continued to use the drones, he has increased it. what about their use for killing, in my mind, innocent women and children? >> let's be clear that they are not manned in that there is no human being aboard the aircraft, but they are manned by people

you are watching, said they do not just go and indiscriminately dropped bombs on people, and no one is monitoring it. the people doing this are using the best intelligence they have, but in the war that we are in with respect to these terrorists, mistakes will be made. i think the administration and our military commanders, as we have heard in recent days, have to do all we can to make absolutely sure of the targets they are going after and not doing it in an indiscriminate way and even letting a target go if the collateral damage and killing innocent civilians is a likelihood and get the guy another time, but drones are just another weapon. they turn out to be a very effective weapon that does not put troops at risk, and i do not see why we should not use them against identified enemy targets. there are people out there trying to the capability to not only attack us here but to kill our soldiers in afghanistan, and

i see no reason to not use those weapons against those who would ll us if they got a chance. tavis: to follow-up, respectively, they have become the weapon of choice. congress does not have a whole lot to say about it at this point. are you ok with using these weapons as a new way of fighting war, because they are not just another weapon. >> they are another weapon. to say this is a weapon of choice, i do not think that the infantrymen walking around on the ground getting hit by ied's, that they are not weapons. you use the best target to -- weapon to go what you're after. they have the power of the purse in congress, and if they choose to, they can get more deeply involved in supervising the program and making sure it meets our constitutional requirements and needs a lot as congress has established the

law. it is a weapon among many weapons. it is a weapon of choice. it has new capabilities that were not available to us before, but using them carefully, just as i would use a platoon going into a village carefully, if you kill women and children when you could have avoided it, there are costs, so use it, and use it with care, and use it with the best intelligence we can find, and always air with the hope of not hitting innocent civilians. tavis: mitt romney has made it clear he is going after the president on the economy. what is your sense of what the president has done or has not done with putting americans back to work? >> i think the presence -- premise is correct. the economy is number one, and it should be, because that is

what the rest of the world is doing, focusing on their economies, stabilizing their economies in europe, the euro zone, or growing their economies in places like china and india and latin america to bring more people up out of poverty, as though the economy is number one. i think the president has done some good things. when he came in, the financial system was in total disarray. i think that has been put on stable ground, but things can still go wrong with the financial system, and what we have to find is a right regulation of our financial system so it has the incentive to invest in things but at the same time is sufficiently regulated so it cannot get in the kind of trouble that we have seen in the past and that we have seen recently, so i give credit to the president for that. destabilize the automobile industry. he is being attacked for not letting it go bankrupt, but the question is, did he fix it, and he fixed it, and his answer

worked, and the american people are being paid back over time. the american economy has to start growing more than it has so far, but at the same time, we see some things happening. i see construction in my own neighborhood. i sense that the economy is starting to pick up in manufacturing, but there is a long way to go, and the president will have to respond to this. mitt romney should rightfully be attacking him. he is on the other side of the issue, but we have to listen carefully to see what the mitt romney policies will be and how much different they will be than what we have. i do not think that cutting taxes is the sole policy. peop have to judge whether they think that in and of itself will fix the economy. you know, i wish that both sides would have adopted some of the recommendations that had come out earlier from senator simpson and his colleagues. that was a balanced approach.

we would have spending cuts, which we need, and at the same time, look for additional sources of revenue. we are spending over $3 trillion per year, and we are only taking in $2.50 trillion, and you cannot do that forever. all you are doing is borrowing that missing $1 trillion and placing the burden of paying the interest on the deck, and that is going to be a worry for our children. i wish the some symbols plan had been taken up -- i wish the simpson-bowles plan had been taken up. but it is hard when both sides are so diametrically opposed and more and more limited to the orthodoxy of their political parties. tavis: speaking about ballots, i want to talk about the reason you are on the program, your book, but there are so many hot spots in the war, if i asked you at -- about the former secretary

of state, about the hot spots, i think i would be remiss if i did not ask you about syria right creek -- quick. that is at the top of our agenda right now. >> it is an extremely difficult problem, and the scenes that come across our television sets every night are horrific. the president has seen it. i have met within a few times, and he is a liar. he should move on. but i am not sure what replaces him, and i am not sure that there is a better solution than what we are trying now, which is to use diplomatic, political, economic pressure to persuade him to find a way to transfer power to responsible, legitimate, new sources of power, new political leadership, so those who suggest we get militarily involved, i would suggest caution. when you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like syria, you have got

to be prepared, as we learned from iraq and afghanistan, to become the government, and i am not sure any country, the united states, or i do not hear anyone else who is willing to take on that responsibility. the other proposal is to arm the opposition. that is something you could certainly look at, but make sure you know who you are arming and what you are likely to get from that solution and then provide safe havens for people, and other countries may be a possibility, but i think that we should stick with the diplomatic and economic and political tract we are currently pursuing. tavis: again, i promise to get to the text, but there are a number of decisions you have made in your life that you finally open up to talk about in the text which allows me to some degree to continue this line of questioning. for example, you talked for the first time extensively about the u.n. speech, and when people say colin powell and the u.n. speech, you know what they are talking about.

what are the lessons learned when you look back on that speech, clearly the most important and at the same time most controversial speech you have ever given in your life. >> that is absolutely right, and i am not opening up for the first time. i have been answering questions about that speech for eight years. every appearance i give, every interview i give, i get asked about it, and the reality is i used the intelligence information that was provided to me and provided to the president and provided to congress and provided to all of our government officials from the intelligence community, all 16 agencies coming together, that said there were weapons of mass destruction in iraq. it turned out those weapons were not there, so the intelligence information was wrong, and i was the most visible presentation of that information, and so everybody remembers my speech, and they do not remember the

president's state of the union address, where he said the same thing, and they forget that congress used that same information to pass a resolution four months before my speech telling the president that it diplomacy does not work, we will approve your taking military action, but the reality is that it is them -- it is my speech that is the most famous on the presentation of the intelligence. the lesson learned, i wish we would have had more time to look over that intelligence and had seen some of the faults that were built into that intelligence. some of it was based on what we thought were multiple good sources that turned out to be one bedsores that we had never talked to. if i had known that, that information would never have been presented. i tried to pick out the best information to make the case. it was attested to by the cia, and there were two investigations average that found fault in the way the analysis was done, and so we just have to be more careful, and i know the cia and other

intelligence agencies have taken action to make sure that kind of false intelligence does notet into the system the way it did in the past. tavis: so if i take your answer and topline it, it was that it was the information you received and that you were not deliberately misled. >> i was not deliberately misled. there are many critics of the president's policy in my speech you want to say, "you misled, you live, you told untruths." we did not lie. we told the world what the intelligence community told us, and six months after the fall of baghdad, when no weapons of mass destruction had been found, the central intelligence agency stood by the judgments they made the previous fall, so that is not deception on my part or the president's part. we were using the information that was given to us, and that was not an untruth. it turned out to be wrong, and, well, we got it wrong, but it

was not that we were trying to deliberately deceived the international community or the american people. tavis: i want to phrase this the right way. your journey, your navigating our way forward in a world where not everything is digital, and what that means for leadership and decision making. you are not a 13-year-old kid. for that matter, i am not the 13-year-old kid, so this does, at some expense. what about navigating your way politically, where the digitization of our lives is concerned? >> well, i was born in analog, and i am 75 years old, and i am trying to become digital to keep up with the world and my grandchildren. the new world is born digital, and we are living in a digital world, it world of touch screen devices and smartphones.

we are living in the world where the internet is driving so much of our live, and that is the world we are living in, and we have to get used to it. everything is moving at 186,000 miles per second. cable television is playing a much more significant role than television ever has before. news, brought gas, are frequently turned into just commentary broadcast, where you are not getting news. you are just getting commentators, commenting on what other commentators said, and i sometimes think we have too much commentary coming at us, and one of the byproducts, tavis, is that we are reinforcing some of our own views on some of these shows and blogs that are coming out so that we are not crossing a divide it to see what other people are thinking and taking their thoughts into account, so i think we are really going to have to start taking a hard look on how we are educating ourselves, how we are educating

our children, and as one person put it, is the world too much with us. if we start pushing back and thinking more analog. my own experience is use the tools that are out there, use the digital world, but never lose sight of the need to reach out and talk to people who do not share your view, listen to them, and see if you can find a way to compromise. we are not compromising enough in our political life. we are discharging and shouting and sticking with our or about it. >> you talked about that in the text, of course, and since you mentioned your grandchildren, i expect that your grandchildren are going to be able to receive the best education. i suspect this is going to be one of the issues again, highly debated in this election, what to do about the education, or to put it another way, the miss education. you talk about it in your book.

>> as you know, my wife and i are committed to helping the youngsters to come along to do well in life, and we talk about the education system as it the education of our children just has to do with schools. sure, we have to have good schools, particularly in the poor neighborhoods, and we want to have the best teachers and to pay the teachers, but the education of the child does not begin at school. it begins at home, when the mother holds the child in her arms, and that child knows, "this is my mother." is that family does not shape that child in the early years by reading to the child, teaching the child numbers, colors, how to tell time, in a world that you and i may remember but not too many remember, mind the adults, mind your manners. my yourself, and go to school to learn. if that child does not show up in school with the right preparation at home and in the

community, then that child is already behind, and by the third grade, that child realizes they are behind, and they start acting out behind. this begins with prenatal care through infancy and then into our educational system. my particular background, i went to public schools. i did not go to the best public schools. i wanted to go to the best public high school in new york city, but they said, "no, you are not smart enough to go here," so i went to one that would take me in, a great public institution, so i went from kindergarten through without ever having to pay a nickel for my education because they thought they had no more important obligation then to invest in the schools and the teachers of the city of our nation by investing in the kids. city colleges are still doing it, but we need to understand that we as citizens, and we as a government, in any community, we

have no more important obligation than to educate those who are going to replace us, and i feel very, very strongly about it, and i talk about all of the time, and i talk about it extensively in my book. tavis: some people would take you to task, and many people would, that, secretary, you cannot solve the education crisis by throwing money at it. what you laid out is the government, backed making sure that its citizenry is educated, and i am a recipient of that myself, but what do you say to people who say we have tried over and over again, the process growing money at the problem, and it is not solving anything, it is not working? >> it is working. my wife and i have been following the tenures of the roughly 2000 schools that were producing most of the dropouts, and we have now seen that those 2000 schools are down to 1600,

so they can be improved. it is not just throwing money. some of the programs that president bush put in place and that president obama has continued, they are showing progress. my wife is with a program, and they hold summit all across the country to make sure the resources in the community, not just money but time and talent and other things that our community can bring to the educational process are being well used, and a number of states are doing a tremendous job. some are falling behind, but it is not that problem. it is a problem that has dimension and structure to it, and we can apply resources with the same structure and dimension that will move in on, and you will recall that i did not just say "throw money at it." that is not throwing money. that is throwing love at a child. tell the child that you loved it and that you are going to take care of it. there is one child had become

the valedictorian of his catholic high school graduating class. about 80 kids graduated, they all graduates, and they are asking him, "how did it work for you?" a hispanic kid from a poor family, and he said, "i was never, ever given the opportunity to fail." his family, his coaches, his teachers, his neighbors would not let him fail. tavis, i am sure that happen to me, and i am sure that happen to you. did you ever go home and think to tell them that you were dropping out of school tavis: -- small? -- that you were dropping out of school? tavis: i get your point. you talk about working hard. there is no american in his right mind who is opposed to working hard, but the reality is

that so many americans are unemployed, underemployed, and they have been unemployed for one, two, three, four years. they have lost their home, and they have lost their four -- they have lost their 401k. as a consequence of political greed and indifference. they find themselves where they are not because, secretary powell, that they did not work hard, so they are tired of hearing people say, "work hard." what do you say to them? >> i am saying if you have a job, where car, but if there are jobs in your community that require a different education or a different experience, prepare yourself for those jobs. there is one item you left out of your listing of things, tavis, and it is that it is not just the u.s. economy standing alone, as we did four decades. we are in an integrated economy that includes europe and the euro zone problems, an economy

that includes china and india with low wages, but they are busy creating wealth to bring more people opt out of poverty, so we have to realize the we are now in an international economic system, and as the president and others on the republican side have been saying in recent days, we could really be hurt and go to the edge again if the euro zone starts to have a significant problem, and spain and greece and ireland and some of the other countries in europe, if they are not able to get their economy going. we could be in trouble in china was not able to keep its economy going, so we have to look at the whole thing as an international problem, not just a national problem for americans. but working hard is a great ethics for all of us to have, and i was saying to my wife the other day, i think every kid should have a meeting on job mopping the floor or doing something they do not like, and then they will realize that they had better get an education and prepare themselves for a higher

skilled american work force. tavis: secretary powell, my time is up, but there is a lot in the book that i did not get too. there are some great ones in here. get mad, and then get over it. avoid having your ego is so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. secretary powell, always a delight to have you on this program. thank you for the time and this book. >> thank you, tavis, and believing in yourself is a possession -- position you want to convey to young people, especially. thanks, tavis. tavis: that is in for our show. we will see you next time. until next time, as always, keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org.

tavis: hi, i'm tavis smiley. join me next time for a conversation with -- a star. that is next time. we will see you then. from "madmen." >> every community has a martin luther king boulevard. it's the cornerstone we all know. it's not just a street or boulevard, but a place where walmart stands together with your community to make every day better. >> and by contributions to your pbs ation from viewers like you. thank you. >> be more.