tavis: good evening. from los angeles, i am tavis smiley. tonight, a conversation with former u.s. secretary of state colin powell. the decorated four-star general has a new book that focuses on the lessons he learned along the way about life and leadership. the new book is called "it worked for me." will talk about the american wars abroad, the crisis in syria, and the 2012 presidential race, of course. we are glad you could join us. the conversation colin powell, coming up right now. >> every community has a martin luther king boulevard. it's the cornerstone we allit'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: it is an honor to welcome colin powell back to this program. the former secretary of state and decorated four-star general is a best-selling author, whose latest book is called "it worked for me." he joins us from washington. secretary colin powell, good to have you back. >> good to be here, tavis. tavis: and a string some questions in the news, i guess that does not surprise you given the world you have played in our government that i would want to pick your brain. let me get to a statement that you made a few weeks ago that

you have not made a decision yet, unless you want to break some news tonight, about the presidential election. i want to get them out of the way and did you a chance to answer them. the first question is, do you intend to endorse in this race, if so, what are you listening or looking for to help make that decision? >> well, tavis, i am a private citizen, and i am on a book tour, not on a political tour, so i do not get a need to endorse somebody right now. as i have done in every election, i always like to examine the two candidates and the people they will bring in, who they might appoint to the supreme court, and look at the whole range of issues before making a decision, and then once i make a decision, i will either vote that decision, or if i think there is a need for me to say something, i will do so, as i did in 2008.

but i am under no pressure in the system to say anything at this point, so i'm going to keep looking and watching. tavis: you talked about the decision not to run for president, and i will come back to that as we get to the book, but as we are talking about presidential politics, let me ask you a question, what about foreign policy. president obama has used more drones now than george bush did. we know that when president bush left office, he asked president obama to continue at least two programs that had to do with foreign policy. the president did not just continue to use them. he increased them. what about the use of these weapons that, to my mind, are involved in killing innocent women and children? >> they are unmans in the sense that there is no one in them,

but they are controlled by summit. they do not go out indiscriminately and drop bombs. the people doing these are using the best intelligence we have, but the war that we are in with respect to these terrorists, mistakes will be made. i think this administration and our military commanders, as we have heard in recent days, after all they can to make absolute sure about the targets we are going after and not do it in an indiscriminate way and sometimes letting a target go if there is a likelihood of collateral damage and killing innocent civilians is a likelihood and pass and get the guy another time. the drones have turned out to be a very effective weapon that does not put american troops at risk, and i do not think we should not use them against identified enemy targets. there are people out there trying to get the opportunity not only to attack us but to kill our soldiers in afghanistan, and i do not see

any reason not to use these weapons against those who would kill us, given the chance. >> not just the weapon, they have become the weapon of choice. we fight wars, and congress for that matter doesn't have a whole lot to say about it at this point. are you ok with using these weapons as a new way to fight a war because they are another weapon? >> to say this is a weapon of choice, i do not think the infantrymen walking along the ground and getting hit by an ied and searching villages and using weapons are not a weapon of choice. if you use whatever weapon is best suited to take out the target you are after. congress has oversight over everything in the military does. they have the power of the purse, if they choose to, they can get more deeply involved in supervising the program in making sure it meets our constitutional requirements and that it meets the law as congress has established that law, so it is one weapons out of

many weapons, and you need to use it very carefully, just as i would use of platoon very carefully. if you indiscriminately use women and children, then you are hurting our cause. use it with care, and use it with the best intelligence you can find, tavis: on domestic policy, it is pretty clear that this campaign is going to be waged over the economy. mr. romney has made it very clear that he is going after the president on his record, on the economy. what is your sense of what the president has done or has not done, as it were, in putting americans back to work? >> i think as i travel around the world and listen to fellow citizens, the economy is number

one, and it should be because that is what the rest of the world is doing, focusing on their economies. focusing on the euro zone, or growing their economies in places like china and india and latin america to bring more people up out of poverty, so the economy is number one. i think the president has done good things. when he came in, i think the financial system has been put on stable ground, as we have seen recently things going on with the financial system, and we have to find is the right level of the financial system so that it has the incentive to invest in things but at the same time it is sufficiently regulated so it cannot get in the kind of trouble that we have seen in the past and we have seen recently, so i give credit to the president for that. he has stabilize the automobile industry. he is being attacked for not letting it go bankrupt, but the question is did he fix it? he fixed it.

a lot are getting paid back over time. the economy i think has to start growing more than has so far. at the same time, we are seeing signs of growth. i see some construction taking place 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 answer for this. mr. romney rightfully should be attacking him. he is on the other side of the issue, but we have to listen carefully to see what mr. romney says his policies will be and how that is different from what is going on now. i do not just think that cutting taxes is a policy. people will have to judge whether they think that in and of itself will fix the economy. you know, i wish both sides would have exhausted some of the recommendations that had come out earlier from senator simpson and his colleagues. that was a balanced approach, where you would have spending

cuts, which we need, cut its federal -- federal spending, and at the same time, look for sources of revenue. when we are spending trillions of dollars per year, and only taking into $0.50 trillion, the only way to do this is by borrowing a missing $1 trillion. and then there is the interest on the debt, and that will be something for our children to worry about, so i wish that the simpson bowls plant -- >> for more information on -- the simpson-bowles plan would have got more attention. more and more of the orthodoxy. tavis: speaking of ballots, i want to use the balance of my time to talk about your book. this is such a hot spot. there are so many hot spots right now in the world. if i asked you as a former

secretary of state about the hot spots, i would not have time to talk about the text, but i would seem remiss if i did not ask you about syria. this is obviously at the top of our agenda. what is the way forward in regards to syria? >> an extremely difficult problem, and there are the scenes that come across our television sets every night that are risky. president façade i have met with and worked with a few times, and he is a liar -- president assad. he should move on. i am not sure there is a better solution than what we are trying to do now, which is to use pressure to try to persuade him to find a way to transfer power to responsible, legitimate news sources of power, new political leadership, so those that suggest we should get militarily involved, i suggest caution. when you decide to get involved in the 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, united states or anyone else, the is willing to take on that responsibility. the other proposal is to arm the opposition. that is certainly something you can look at, but make sure you know who you are arming and what you will get from that solution and then provide safe havens to people, maybe in other countries as a possibility, but i think to stick with the diplomatic and economic tracked for the time being. >> again, i am picking a brain around the globe, and i want to get to the tax, but there are a number of political issues that you made in your life that you finally opened up and talk about in the text which allows me to some degree continue this line of questioning. for example, for the first time, you talked extensively about the u.n. speech, and everybody knows what we are talking about when and we say that.

talking about lessons learned, what did you learn as you look back on that speech? clearly the most important and that 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 the past 80 years. every speech and interview i give, i get asked about it. i used the intelligence information that was provided to me and was provided to the president and provided to the congress and provided to all of the 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, but they do not remember the

president's state of the union address, where he said the same thing, and a forget -- and they forget that congress use that same information to pass a resolution months before my speech to say if the actions do not work, they would approve military action, but that is true that it is my speech that is the most famous presentation of the intelligence. i wish we would have looked over the intelligence and had seen some of the faults that were built into that intelligence, the fact that some of the information was based on what we thought was multiple bad sources -- multiple good sources that turned out to be one bad swords. i tried to pick out of the national intelligence estimate the best estimate to make the case as attested to by the cia, and there were two investigations afterwards that found fault with the way the analysis was done, so we just have to be more careful. i know that the cia and other

intelligence agencies have to take action to make sure that type of false information does not get into the system as in the past. tavis: so if i take your answer in topline is coming your answer is that you received bad intel, not that you were deliberately misled. >> i was not deliberately misled. there are a lot of critics of the president and of my speech who want to say that i lied or that i told untruths. we did not do that. we said what the intelligence community was telling us, and six months after the fall of baghdad, when no weapons of mass destruction were found, the central intelligence agency was still saying, they were still standing by the judgments they had made the previous fall, so that is not deception on my part or the president's part. we were using information that was given to us. that is not an untruth. it turned out to be wrong. well, we got it wrong, but it

was not an opportunity to try to deceive the american people. >> one of the experiences you talk about in the book, i want to phrase this the right way, your journey, your navigating your way forward in a way where everything is not a digital and what that means for leadership and decision making. this does come at some expense. one of the lessons you learned along the way about having to navigate the world politically and outside the body politic were the comedienne the digital -- were the digital. >> i have been trying to become digital to keep up with the world and my grandchildren. they live in a digital world. we're living in the world of touchscreen devices and smartphone.

we're living in a world where the internet is driving some much of our life. that is the world we live 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 in your life than any before. news broadcasts have turned into commentary broadcasts. you're getting commentators commenting on what other commentators have said. we cannot filter it out. one of the byproducts is that we are reinforcing our own views on some of the shows and other blogs and other things that come out so we're not crossing the divide tooth -- to see what other people are thinking and take their thoughts into account. .e're taking a hard look

we're thinking in an analog system. my experience is use the tools and use the digital world. never lose sight of the world to reach out and talk to people who do not share your view. listen and see if you can find a way to compromise. we're not compromising enough in our political life. we're arguing and shouting and sticking with our predetermined points of view. our orthodoxy. >juncker you talk about that in the text and sends you mention your grandchildren, it will have a chance to receive the best education this country can afford but you started out in public education. it will be one of those issues, there is the miss education of america's children that you talked about in the book. tell me more. >> i talked about it all the

time. my wife and i are committed to helping those citizens, youngsters coming along to do well in life. we talk about the education system and -- as if the education of our children has to do with schools. we have to have the best schools in our poor neighborhoods and we want to have the best teachers and pay the best teachers. the education of a child does not begin in school, it begins at home, when a mother holds her child and the child knows that as my mother. that is the language that child will learn and if that mother and father hopefully or family does not ship that child in the early years, by reading to the child, teaching the child numbers, colors, how to tell time, and a word you and i may remember, mind. mind your manners. mind your goals. mind yourself and go to school and learn. if that child does not sure what the right preparation.

by the third grade that child realizes he or she is behind and they start acting out. 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 school in new york city but they said you are not smart enough to go their saar went to the school that happen to let me in and i went to the city college of new york, a great public institution and i went from kindergarten all the way through college and never having paid a nickel for my education because the people and the government of the city felt they had no more important obligation then to invest in the future of school and the teachers of the city of our nation by investing in the kids. city college is still doing it but we need to understand that we as citizens and as a government in any community have

no more important obligations then to educate those who will replace us and i feel strongly and i talked about it all the time, i talked about extensively. >>tavis: if someone wanted to te you to task, it would be that you cannot solve the education crisis by throwing money at it. what you just laid out is the government and you were going up -- you had no greater priority. i am a recipient of that myself. but what do you say to people that say we have tried over and over again, the process of throwing money at the problem and it is not working, it is not solving anything? >> it is working. my wife and i spend a lot of time following the roughly 10 years ago to thousand schools that were producing most of the dropouts and we now have seen those 2000 schools are down to 1600.

they can be improved. it is not just throwing money. some of the programs that president bush put in place and president obama has continue with are starting to show progress. my wife is running a program through the america's promise alliance calledgrad -- called grad nation. other things that our community can bring to the educational process that are being well used and a number of the states are doing a tremendous job. some are falling behind. it is not an insoluble problem. it is a problem that has to mention and structure and we can apply resources to that problem with the same structure and mention it will move in on. you recall i did not just say throw money at it. i said start in the home and that is not throwing money, that is throwing love. tell a child you will love and take care of them. there is one kid in denver, who

became the valedictorian of his catholic high school graduating class. the all graduated. they're asking him, how did you come up? how did it work for you? a hispanic kid with a poor family. he said i was never ever given the opportunity to fail. his teachers, his family, his coaches, is friends, his neighborhood would not let him fail. that is what happened to me and i am sure that is what happened to you. did you ever dream of going home and tell your parents were dropping out of school? >tavis: i take your point. i would have got a be down if i had the thought. >> i would have been thrown out and they might have gotten another kid. tavis: we're talking about you now, back to the book. you talk so much about this, "it worked for me. it talked about working hard. there is no american who is opposed to working hard.

so many americans are unemployed, they are underemployed, they have been unemployed for one, two, three, four years, they have lost everything. as a consequence of this recession and corporate greed, as a consequence of political indifference. they find themselves were there but it is not because secretary powell, they did not work hard. those persons who are tired of someone saying, or card, what do you say to them? >> i say, continue to work to hard if you do not have -- if you have a job. if you do not have a job but there are jobs that require a higher level of education and different skill experience, prepare yourself for those jobs. there is one dimension you left out and that is it is not just the u.s. economy standing alone by itself as it did for so many decades. we're in an integrated economy. an economy that includes europe and its eurozone problems and an economy that includes china and

india with low wages but we are busy creating wealth to bring more people up out of poverty. we have to realize we're in an international economic system. as the president and others on the republican side have been saying, we can be heard and go to the edge again if the eurozone starts to have significant problems and plan spain and greece and ireland and some of the other countries are not able to get their economy going, we can be in trouble if china was not able to keep its economy going. we have to look at the whole thing as an international problem and not just a national problem for americans. working hard is a great athlete for all this to have. i was saying to my wife the other night, every 17-year-old kid should get a menial job somewhere mopping the floor or doing something they do not like and realize they had better get their education and prepare themselves for higher skilled

american workforce. tavis: my time is up regrettably. there is so much in the book i could not get to that you can imagine. a lot of lessons that we could not get too. there are some great ones in here. get mad and get over it. avoid having your ego close to your position so that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. perpetuation -- perpetual optimism is good. thank you for your time and the bug. gladje have you on the program. >> optimism, confidence, and believing to yourself are the messages i want to convey to young people, especially. tavis: that is our show for tonight. see you next time on pbs. until then, good night from l.a. and as always, keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org.

>> join me next time for conversation with eddie levert on his first solo cd. that is next time. we will see you then. >> every community has a martin luther king boulevard. it is the cornerstone we all know. it is not just a straight or boulevard but a place where walmart stands together with your community to make everyday better. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> be more. thank you. >> be more.