you know, i, i used to play tennis with robert mcnamara, the architect of vietnam when he was still physically fit, but obviously, emotionally and mentally, a crushed man in the wake of his disappointments used to sit around with dick cheney him and talk about the civil war at cocktail parties, my point is not to drop names, but, but when i went into that scene, i thought there must be some kind of center of power in washington. and the more i learned, the more i realize that, that there really is no, they're there. and that, that the power structure is just these individuals who sort of fall into it in some kind of serendipitous, ambitious way. and, and their decisions can have such profound consequences for the rest of us. i mean, think about 911 for example. you know, the most successful, a symmetrical episode of warfare since the trojan course, you know, for the cost of less than $1.00 scanning machine in one airport in anywhere in the u. k. that handful of, of, of, of fanatics. and you know, brought death to 2800 americans. and let's always remember who we are. we lost 6000 boys at at nor

robert mcnamara quit the -- or he was fired.ill didn't know at that point whether lbj fired him or not, but he was having qualms about vietnam but waited almost 30 years to write a book that said, we all made mistakes in vietnam. well, we didn't all make them. he made them and a few others. and the other thing is why did we have to wait for 30 years? in colin powell's case, this is someone with such towering integrity and sensitivity that he suffered from the fact that he had delivered that speech that allowed there to be a war that privately he had at best huge reservations about and probably did not want to see a war in iraq even though he thought there might be wmds, and at the same time, you know, if you were trying to torture colin powell, what's the one thing you would take away if there him is authority, credibility. that's what his speech did. it's waning because he believed the intelligence he had studied made a lot of the intelligence he thought was wrong, but the result was the one moment of that decade that le'll be