 Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library. I'm Mark Uptegrove, the President and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. And I'm delighted to welcome you here tonight. And I want to give a special thanks to our sponsors, St. David's Health Care and the Moody Foundation. We have a full house tonight. We're also at work on some wonderful programs in the future. Before the year rounds out on December 4th, we will host legendary Motown artist, Mary Wilson, one of the founding members of the Supremes. And we're doing that in conjunction with our temporary exhibit, Motown, The Sound of Young America, which will be here through the end of January. And a special treat is after the program with Mary Wilson, she will be at a cocktail reception upstairs in the exhibit. So if you haven't seen it, you can do so with an actual Motown artist in attendance. We hope you join us for that. We are hard at work on next year as well. On February 11th, we'll host former US Senator, NBA Hall Famer and Olympic gold medalist, Bill Bradley, who will talk about his remarkable journey through this world. And on March 5th, we will host Ford Foundation President, Darren Walker, who will talk to us about moral leadership. And we've got some great surprises for the balance of next spring as well. So more to come on that. I have the duty of telling you that Ambassador Rice's very good book, Tough Love, will be sold in the lobby after this program. Introducing Ambassador Rice will be my fellow LBJ Foundation trustee, Cappy McGar, who I'll welcome to the podium in a moment. But before I do, I want to give a special introduction to the moderator of tonight's program. Yesterday, you may have read the news that the Archivist of the United States has appointed the sixth director of the LBJ Presidential Library, Mark Lawrence, to the position. And I can tell you, yes, I can tell you that no one is more thrilled than the members of the LBJ Foundation. Mark has been an associate professor here at the University of Texas since 2000. And he's also the director of graduate studies for UT's Clements Center for National Security. Beginning in 2015, he has taught an undergraduate course for liberal arts honors students called the Johnson Years. This was a course that was initiated by Harry Middleton, the founding director of the LBJ Presidential Library early in the millennium. And he handed it off to me, and I handed it off to Mark. And I actually have had the privilege of co-teaching that course with Mark. I got to tell you, there's no more humbling experience than teaching a course with Dr. Mark Lawrence, who is just an exceptional professor. Some of our students are here this evening, in fact. In 2005, he won the President's Associates Award for Teaching Excellence. And earlier this year, he was awarded the Silver Spurs Centennial Teaching Fellowship from UT Austin's College of Liberal Arts. And what's significant about that award is it's student nominated. And it's a testament to what a wonderful professor he is. He is the author of Assuming the Burden, Europe, and the American, pardon me while I turn the page, which is stuck, Commitment to War in Vietnam. The Vietnam War, a concise international history, and he's currently at work on In the Shadow of Vietnam, the United States, and the Third World in the 1960s. Mark is a native of Massachusetts. He earned his bachelor's degree at Stanford University in 1988 and his doctorate degree in history from Yale University in 1998. He's married to Stephanie Aspachin. Excuse, that's a mouthful. Let me try that again. He's still married to Stephanie Aspachin, who is here with us this evening. She, too, is a professor here at the University of Texas and teaches in the Department of Sociology. Mark and Stephanie have two daughters, and we are just delighted to welcome you to the LBJ Presidential Library Official Circuit. A hand for Mark Lawrence, the new director of the LBJ Presidential Library. And here to honor our special guest and introduce her properly is Cappy McGarre. Cappy? Lyndon Johnson once said, democracy is a constant tension between truth and half-truth. And in the arsenal of truth, there is no greater weapon than fact, end quote. Ignore for a moment if we're up to date that sentiment today. We would say democracy is a constant tension between truth and outright lie. My point is no one has done more than tonight's speaker to find fact, speak truth, and use both fact and truth to guide our nation's engagement of the world. Ambassador Susan Rice has served as Assistant Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, National Security Advisor under President Barack Obama, and the US Ambassador to the United Nations. Believe it or not, Ambassador Rice and I have some career milestones in common. We've both been on the board of the Kennedy Center. We both served under President Clinton and Obama. She sits on the board of Netflix. I get bored and watch Netflix. The parallels are stunning. Before I bring her up, I would like to share one more sentiment from Lyndon Johnson. At one point, Johnson said, and I quote, I don't believe I'll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs no matter how successful it is because I didn't go to Harvard, end quote. But Ambassador Rice, you showed the world that you don't have to go to Harvard to find success in foreign policy. I'm sure it'll be an inspiration to many when they find out you've achieved your success despite having attended Stanford and Oxford. Her new book, Tough Love, My Story of Things Worth Fighting for is a candid account of her incredible career so far. Please join me in welcoming Ambassador Susan Rice and Mark Lawrence. Good evening, everyone. Thanks for coming out. And let me say a big word of thanks as well. And I feel like my first words out of my mouth now that I've been introduced to you all as the new director of the LBJ Library should be to quote Lyndon Johnson. So in response to Mark's very kind words, I will say I really appreciate those wonderful words my father would have been so pleased and my mother would have believed them. Congratulations on your new role. It's a tremendous honor to be here and to have been given this opportunity to play a leadership role in this library. I can't wait for early January to roll around so I can take over those duties. But I have to say I can think of no better moment to step into this world than to be here on this stage tonight with such a distinguished guest, Ambassador Susan Rice. Susan Rice, as you know, has written what is really a remarkable book that I've enjoyed reading closely over the last couple of weeks. Also a big book, a big undertaking for a couple of weeks. Sorry about that. Really in some ways what strikes me about the book is it's really multiple books. It's many books in one. It's a story of her family. It's a story of her own coming of age. It's a story of policymaking and politics. And it is a kind of advice book in some ways. Sometimes explicitly and sometimes between the lines about how to be successful in the policymaking world or really in life in general, I think. And what I'd like to do tonight is to touch on all of those themes in the time available to us. But I have to begin by putting the book on the backboard for just a moment, I promise. That's what they all say. I need exactly that. Sorry. I think you're probably getting a lot of this on your book tour. There are other events going on in the world, of course, literally as we speak. I don't know what you're talking about. I can't imagine. Today was a big day in Washington. And I was in Austin. And you were a good place to be, a good place to be a couple of 1500 miles away. I want to ask you about the impeachment inquiry. Not in a way to elicit a comment about the ins and outs of the case or what's the daily grind of the story, but rather from your standpoint as someone interested in foreign policy and foreign affairs, what is the impact of all this on America's standing in the world? And is this something that we should be concerned about? Well, the short answer is it's not good. But I think it didn't happen in a vacuum. And I think you have to look at it in the larger context, in the larger context also of our current standing in the world, which is to put it diplomatically, I'd say under stress. There are many reasons for it, but I think among the most important are the fact that our allies and partners already are doubting our constancy. And we've seen really from the beginning of this presidency a sustained effort to denigrate and diminish our treaty alliances and to put them in a transactional frame. And we're seeing that now very starkly, for example, with South Korea, where we're in the process of trying to quadruple, sorry, not quadruple, increased by five times and just keep it simple. The amount that we ask them to pay for our option to be based there in one year, it's not going well. But we have really eroded trust in our alliances through all of these measures, and including steps like blindsiding the Kurds in Syria with our sudden decision to withdraw. And so everybody's nervous and jittery anyway. And meanwhile, our adversaries are sort of feeling their oats and Putin's in a good mood, Xi Jinping is in a good mood and Kim Jong-un just told us to take a hike after we told him that we're gonna not even continue our exercises with South Korea. And he said, basically I'm not gonna give President Trump a photo op and a political boost with a negotiation as if he's doing us some kind of favor. So everything is kind of upside down long before we get to impeachment. And so against this backdrop and in the context of a world that is now seeing countless untruths emanate from the White House, we had impeachment and the inquiry. And I worked in the Clinton administration for eight years. So I've seen impeachment before. And I've also seen that it's possible to wall off the business of combating impeachment and sort of put it behind a firewall while the rest of the business of government continues. And that's what happened in the Clinton administration. It seems that in the Trump era, because Trump I think so identifies himself with the state and he is his own best advocate or spokesperson and his own mind that that separation is not even being attempted. So the business of government is inevitably going to be compromised by this process to the extent that in other circumstances it needed to be. And then so I think that the biggest added concern with impeachment with respect to our standing in the world is actually the substance of what this is about. This is not about stuff in the Oval Office with smoking material. Kathy, Dave. This is about the President of the United States in the conduct of our foreign policy. Basically signaling that if you foreign country do me a personal political favor, things will be good. And if you don't, things are gonna be bad. And that's the message we're sending to countries around the world. And that has got to add to that insecurity quite measurably. So it's a very, it's a precarious combination. Seems to me you make such an important point that's very easy to miss these days at the heart of all this controversy is a diplomatic relationship between the United States and Ukraine. What's your sense of the state of that relationship? And what would Susan Rice say is the best road forward in terms of the American strategy toward Ukraine? Well, we actually were, for the most part, on the right course with respect to Ukraine. In advance of all this, I mean the official US policy was to provide economic, political, and military support to enable Ukraine to resist Russian aggression or at least keep it relatively at bay even as there's still a hot conflict going on in the east of Ukraine. And to press the Ukraine government to reduce if not eliminate corruption. That's been consistent policy since Yanukovych was driven out in 2014. Actually it was policy before them but it was going nowhere with Yanukovych. So along comes the sidebar policy run by apparently it seems Giuliani which is absolutely counter that. It's actually encouraging a certain kind of corruption but a corruption that benefits the President of the United States if the facts are to be believed. And at the same time it's withholding the very political and military support that this country that is a partner not a treaty ally facing active aggression from our critical adversary were withholding that assistance. And that support to a newly elected President who ran and won on an anti-corruption agenda. So a well-conceived, well-executed policy which was the official policy has been compromised to put it mildly by the sidebar policy. And now if you're in Ukraine you don't know what to do because if you say something about Trump you're in trouble. If you don't say something about Trump you're in trouble. If you're trying to navigate those very complicated shoals in Washington of maintaining bipartisan support which Ukraine had done, you don't know what to do now. So it's really unfortunate. And it gives above all Russia the upper hand particularly as they're going into potential negotiations and it couldn't be more poorly timed. And speaking of Russia what's your sense of the state of American vulnerability with another election coming along to Russian meddling in American politics? Well this has gotta be understood to be a constant. It's unfortunately the new normal. Russia is not by the way just meddling every two years in our electoral processes even though it is doing that. It's doing something much more dangerous which is on a daily basis through social media through traditional media and a whole variety of means. What Russia is trying to do is divide us from within. They understand that we have these profound domestic political divisions already. And I write about them at some length in the last chapter of Tough Love and I say that our domestic political divisions are in my judgment our greatest national security vulnerability. And one of the key reasons I say that is because our adversaries principally Russia have figured out that they can weaken us, undermine our leadership in the world, discredit the democratic model by exacerbating those divisions and basically putting fuel on our domestic fires. So whether the issues are race or immigration or gay rights or guns, whatever the most hot button divisive issues they are playing on both sides of those issues. Stoking fear, stoking hate, stoking distrust of Americans against one another. And they understand that if they can cause us to fear each other, hate each other, maybe even fight each other, then they can defeat us without ever firing a bullet. So this is really a very serious problem that we face and it's partly what the Russians are doing and we have to work to defend against that. But I'm less concerned about electoral manipulation next time because we have seen that our systems are hardened. There's still much more we can and should do. There's legislation sitting in the Senate that the leadership won't move that would put additional resources into this and require paper ballots and automatically sanction countries that interfere in our process. But it's actually harder than people think to manipulate the vote count because our systems are not attached to the internet, et cetera. And we have now strengthened them. But what is impossible to quantify but I think even more pernicious is how the Russians have demonstrated capability to influence our perceptions of our elections or our candidates through falsehoods and manipulation of truth while dividing us internally. And so that is the more steady state long-term threat that I worry about even more than the election security. It's such a powerful moment in the book. I think it comes in the last few pages. You are, I don't think you could state it more bluntly. Today our domestic political divisions constitute the greatest threat to our national security. And you've touched on one major reason, no doubt, why you feel that way. Can you unpack that assertion a little bit further? Are there other elements to this threat posed by the... There are various elements but the opening that it gives our adversaries is obviously a very critical one. We've talked about that. But it also, our domestic divisions are preventing us from doing the most basic things that we must do to be competitive in the 21st century. So think about, if the 21st century is the era where it's gonna be a competition between the United States and China in technology and for economic primacy, for security dominance in Asia and beyond. China is full steam ahead with its triumvirate of the private sector, government, and academia building its technological capabilities and everything from space to artificial intelligence, to biotechnology, they're just going for it. And they can because their system is an autocratic one. In our case, we can't even be sure that in the next few weeks we're not gonna have another government shutdown. We can't pass basic legislation to update our roads and our bridges and our airports and to lay broadband across the country. So our divisions are preventing us from investing in the things that we profess to all care about and agree on that are absolutely essential to keeping our head above water in a competitive global environment. So there are many ways that these divisions are crippling us. But those are two examples of how it affects us in the national security realm. Thank you. So let's come to the book. Okay. See? How long did that take? I've got 15 minutes. That's up. Tough love. Doesn't sound like a policy book. It's not a policy book. Well, in part. In part. How did you come up with that title? Why Tough Love? What do you mean by that? Tough Love means to me loving fiercely, but not uncritically. And I picked it as the title after frankly wrestling with the title for a while because it actually perfectly encapsulated so many aspects of my experience. It's how my parents raised me. It's how my husband and I have tried to raise our kids. It's how I've tried to lead teams in government. And it's also how I've tried to serve our country. I love this country fiercely and passionately, but when I'm representing it at the United Nations or trying to help guide our national security policy, I do it with a recognition that we're not perfect, that we have made mistakes, that we are gonna make mistakes, and we have to be willing to acknowledge them and to learn from them and improve on them. So when I was a kid, I had these wonderfully accomplished parents, but they weren't letting me and my brother get away with a lot of stuff. And when we were slacking or doing something less than our best, they would be clear about telling us. And I learned that both as a recipient and a giver of Tough Love, that the best kind of caring comes from those like your parents who have your best interest at heart. And some of the best professional advice I've ever received were from colleagues who realized that I needed advice that may have been hard to receive, but that they were kind enough to give. So it accomplished all these different things. You spent a good chunk of the first part of the book, which to me is in many ways the most striking part of the whole thing. Talking about your parents. And for those of you who have not yet read this wonderful book, Ambassador Rice's mother came from a family of immigrants that arrived in the United States in the early 20th century and your father was a descendant of slaves in South Carolina. And yet both were remarkably successful and created enormous opportunities for you. So what do you attribute their success? Well, they came from such different circumstances and each in a way unique. My mother's family emigrated to Portland, Maine from Jamaica in 1912. And there were not a lot of folks who looked like me in Jamaica in 1912. I mean, in Maine, they looked like me. There were a lot in Jamaica, not a lot in Maine. And they came with nothing. My grandfather was a janitor, my grandmother was a maid, but they, like so many immigrants came with a passion to give their family a better life. And they worked very hard and they saved and they were extremely disciplined and they sent all five of their kids to college. My mother was the youngest. My uncles, all four of them attended Bowdoin College in Maine. And my grandfather who never even finished high school was the first man to have four sons attend Bowdoin. And actually they made him an honorary member of what would have been his graduating class if he'd been able to go to college. But two of my uncles became doctors, one an optometrist and the fourth a university president. And then along came my mother, the baby, who couldn't go to Bowdoin because she was a girl. And this was 1950. And so she ended up having to go to some place that nobody really had heard of called Radcliffe. And she excelled there. She had been high school valedictorian and then she went to Radcliffe and was president of the whole student body and Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa and all this stuff. But she almost didn't get the chance to go to Radcliffe because my grandfather soon before she was supposed to go to college had a catastrophic accident. He fell in his job, he was a janitor and he fell down an elevator shaft. And he broke his back and he broke his legs. And he was in the hospital for almost a year. And so all their savings was drained. And my mom had been entitled to the scholarship to Radcliffe from the main state committee because she was valedictorian of Portland High School. And it was denied to her because she was black. They told her that the scholarship was for girls who would come back from Radcliffe and be able to move in the proper circles in order to raise money for the college. And of course being black she was thought not to be able to move in the proper circles. So she almost didn't get to go but her high school principal and her debate coach went to bat for her and got Radcliffe to give her the money. And then she went on to this great success but this fueled her passion for enabling other low income students from this all over this country to be able to attend college. And her greatest achievement, she was a corporate executive eventually and sat on 11 corporate boards but her proudest achievement was to be known as the mother of the Pell Grant program. She was instrumental in the establishment and the sustainment of the Pell Grant which has enabled 80 million Americans to go to college. So she was kind of what I think we can say in polite company a bad ass. And yet came from, a background where education and excellence and striving and building on the achievements of each prior generation had real resonance. And that whole story was very important to me and my brother growing up. My father on the other hand was born into the heart of Jim Crow in segregation in South Carolina in 1920. And yet he was the third generation in his family to be able to go to college. My great grandfather who had been a slave actually got a college education after fighting in the Civil War in the Union Army side. And he founded a school in New Jersey that for 70 years from the 1880s to the 1950s educated generations of African Americans, the Boarding Town School in New Jersey in both vocational and technical skills but also in college preparatory skills. So by the time my dad came along even though he was really freighted down by the oppression of segregation in that time and the height of lynching and all this and he served in World War II at Tuskegee with the airmen but very much felt the oppression of serving on behalf of a country that was fighting for the freedom of everybody but his own people. And he would go off base trying to get something to eat in a restaurant and of course wouldn't be served but would see German POWs being served. And so his whole challenge was, I know I have talent, I know there are expectations of me from the success of my parents and grandparents but how in a world where everything and everybody is telling me I can't do I succeed. He left Tuskegee after the end of the war, came out to Berkeley, got his PhD in economics, was a professor at Cornell, served in the Treasury Department in the World Bank and then ultimately was a governor of the Federal Reserve. And so again, education, excellence, service. These were on both sides of my family the values and expectations that I was raised with. And they also taught me a lot about race from very different perspectives. My mother from the perspective of being one of very few in the New England environment but my father really more powerfully with how do you psychologically overcome the burden of racism and excel? How do you not let that oppression which is the biggest perception of you become your own self perception? And he wrestled with that until really he was probably in his 30s or 40s. And he realized that bigotry is the result of somebody else's insecurity. And if you let that insecurity become your own then the bigot is one and you've defeated yourself. So he tried to develop and to teach me and my brother a sort of psychological jujitsu which is to sort of make the bigotry be the biggest problem. And he had a saying which was so powerful which he imparted to me and my brother which was if my being black is going to be a problem it's gonna be a problem for somebody else, not for me. And that was the core of his confidence which enabled his competence to be fully realized. And I say in the book, his whole life was a mission to prove America wrong on race. And I think to a large extent in his life he did. Dan? Family is a theme that runs through the whole book. There are many really striking passages where you approach this theme in a different way to talk about your own, your husband and your two children. And in particular the toll that public criticism and in many ways the daily grind of your very demanding career has had. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. What is the personal toll of having a career as spectacularly successful but also very busy as yours has been? Yeah, well it is as you said, I mean it is a book about family and it's a book about and maybe we can touch back on this but I've talked about these extraordinary parents I had but they had a horrible, horrible marriage that ended in a bitter and ugly divorce. And I talk about the impact that had on me but it also, one of the many impacts it had on me was to make me as determined as I possibly could be to have a successful family of my own. One that stayed together. And the work of serving in government, particularly at higher and higher levels is extraordinarily stressful on one individually but also on the whole family. And fortunately, very, very fortunately, I've had a husband and a partner for now 27 years. We've been together 37 years if you count the 10 years before we got married who has just been an extraordinary ballast and source of support. And a booster of my professional work. And then as my kids came along and got older, they too really got what it is that I was doing and why it mattered. But there's a pretty big gap between my kids' age, they're about five and a half years apart. And when I was ambassador to the UN for four and a half years, I was living in New York during the week and my family stayed in Washington where my husband was an executive producer at ABC News and our kids were in school. And so I'd come back and forth and that was really a tough for me anyway and I'm sure worse for my husband, a tough period. And at the same time, my parents were aging and ailing and became very ill. So we were dealing with sick parents, young kids and then a physical separation. We dealt with that in part, frankly, by my husband deciding not just for that reason but for a variety of reasons to step back from his work at ABC and to focus on our family and being for a period of time a stay at home dad which was a hard choice for both of us but I think it was the right choice for us collectively. And then when I experienced the fall out from my Sunday show appearances after Benghazi and the terrorist attack that cost four American lives including that of our ambassador, you'll recall that I was roundly verrated and vilified for delivering talking points that we understood to be our best current information at the time I went on the shows but then changed in some respects in the week and 10 days later. And in the context of a very, very heated reelection campaign I was attacked for not just the message but as the messenger. I write in the book, by the way, about how my mother had warned me not to go on the Sunday shows. And as I say that with exact one of the, the other title of this book could have been, mom's always right. I could write that book too. That's what I'm trying to get my kids to understand that. But my daughter who at the time was just nine years old really couldn't understand what was going on. And we didn't realize the impact that this was having on her. But about six weeks into the public daily vilification she started complaining of seeing images of men coming at her out of walls. She was hallucinating and her father and I were terrified and we took her in for a battery of tests and they were looking at ruling out or pursuing the obvious explanations. Could she have a brain tumor? Could it be a form of psychosis or schizophrenia? Could it be a vision problem? And they, after a couple of weeks, ruled all the worst case scenarios out. And they concluded sort of by process of elimination that she was having a stress reaction to what she saw happening to me. And we as parents made the mistake of not recognizing early enough that when the television is on and we may be tuning it out, a kid that age is digesting it but not able to process it. And so she went through a really difficult and scary period which was also terrifying for us. And after nine months to a year it stopped and thankfully she's an extraordinarily happy, healthy, successful, about to be 17 year old. But that's one of the ways in which you might not anticipate that this kind of work can affect your family. And it really also very much upset my mother who had just had multiple or her fourth or fifth cancer surgery and a stroke. And she couldn't turn off the television. She was just obsessed with the fact that her firstborn child that she so loved and supported was being demonized. And that my integrity and my intelligence and all this was being questioned. That was brutal for her. So I put all that in the book, some very personal stuff, because I do want people to understand regardless of your political persuasion that the politics of personal destruction in Washington which have become even more commonplace since my experience in 2012 comes at a real cost for people who didn't sign up for this. The people who love the target of the vitriol and the people who work with the target. And my colleagues really also suffered more than I ever realized at the time. And yet despite all of that, I'm a huge, huge believer in the importance and the value of public service. And the only thing I can say is, may you be blessed with family that will be supportive as I was. Now on a later note, there are some wonderfully funny moments in the book. And I don't think, including my favorite, the middle finger to Richard Holbrook. But my favorite, and I would not be doing my duty as moderator of this event if I didn't ask you to talk about a certain plane flight over Namibia. I forget the year. Oh yes, this is before dinner. You sure you want to do this? Before dinner, that's the moment to do it. I guess it's better than after dinner. So, the year is 1998. No, the year is 1999. And I am the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. We have a massive war in the Congo, which has sucked in six or seven neighboring states. And I am traveling with a small group of colleagues, our National Security Council Senior Director for African Affairs, a friend of mine named Gail Smith, the President's Special Envoy for Central Africa, the Great Lakes Region as it was called, former Congressman Howard Wolpe, and our special assistant. And we are traveling to all the countries that have been involved one way or the other in the Congo War. And we're leaving South Africa to fly to the capital of Angola, Luanda. And it's about a four-hour flight. And at that rank in government as an assistant secretary, you definitely don't merit a military plane. And so, when you're flying around Africa, though, the commercial connections are terrible and dangerous. And so, we had to rent a very small prop plane to take us those four hours across the desert. And it's a morning flight, we left about eight o'clock, we're gonna get around noon, and we were going straight into a meeting with the Angolan President right off the plane. And about an hour into the fight, I start to feel kind of clammy and start to think I might not be feeling well. And the way we're seated, there are two of us sitting side by side facing this way, and then there are two more with their backs to you in the audience, their knees to us facing this way. So we're very tight quarters. And I apologize to my colleagues and I say I think I'm gonna get sick. And I reach for the barf bag and my friend Gail puts up a newspaper to give me some privacy. And I utilize the bag. But I realize very quickly that there's a hole in the bottom of the bag. And so I'm sitting in this dress, ready to go into a meeting with the President of Angola, and I'm just covered. Fortunately, the plane was landing for a refueling stop in the middle of the desert in Namibia. And we get off and all there is is literally a fuel pump, a hose, and something that kind of looks like an outhouse. And my friend Gail takes the hose and turns it on me and hoses me down. Literally hoses me down soaking wet. And then we go into the outhouse and she makes me stripped to make sure that we got all the stuff that needed to be gotten off. And we get back on that plane and I air dry. All the way to Angola and ready to go to the meeting. That's some of the less glamorous aspects of diplomacy. I'm not sure how to follow that up. Back to the serious stuff. Oh man. Across your time in the Clinton administration and then of course in the Obama administration, you dealt with any number of crises. The Rwanda crisis, the East Africa bombings back in the Clinton years, the Ebola epidemic, Syria, Iran, you name it. What is the one that sticks with you most? What sticks in what sense? That emotionally as a learning experience was where you... Wonder if you made the right call. Well, I think you'd have to then pick something in the Obama era where I was part of making a call as opposed to in the Clinton era where in some instances, particularly in my first role, my first job in government, I was a junior staffer at the National Security Council at age 28. I had the responsibility for the portfolio that encompassed the United Nations and peacekeeping. And that's the vantage point from which I had a real front row seat on our experience in Somalia, particularly with Black Hawk down and then subsequently with the Rwandan genocide. But that wasn't a place where I was a decision maker, but it was a place I learned a lot of lessons from what I observed and what I experienced. But if it were a place where I wonder if the advice I gave was right or the decisions that I made were right, it would have to be in the more recent era. And to be honest, I mean, I wrestle as frankly as I can as I relate some of these issues we worked on, you name several of them, with where do we get it right and where do we get it wrong? And where did I get it right and where did I get it wrong? And I also try to tell the story of how national security decision making is actually supposed to operate, not in a hopefully dry and boring way, but just by bringing you into the room and letting you participate in our deliberative process. But I think that the issue that all of us, I am now speaking from my colleagues, but all of us struggled hardest with was Syria. And I'll now speak for myself. I mean, I do share in the book where I think we got it right and wrong. There were really three different aspects to the Syria challenge. There was the question of once chemical weapons were employed in 2013, the so-called red line had been crossed. And the issue was whether we should have used force without going to Congress for authorization or should we have asked Congress for authorization and come back to that. Then the second question, and the second one is really the hardest one to me, but should the United States have become directly involved militarily in the civil conflict in Syria, given its humanitarian costs, given its regional security implications, given the refugee flows and the destabilization that that entailed. And the time to have done so would have been before the Russians got in September of 2015. And we struggled over and over again with some of the most contentious discussions and debates within the national security team about that question. And then the third issue, which was really the easiest one, about which there was virtually no debate, was whether we should be involved in Syria in order to fight ISIS. And for that, the present clearly saw our immediate interests implicated. And we engaged in a way though differently than in Afghanistan originally and in Iraq, which was to work with local partners. In this case, the Syrian Kurds and Arabs in the North and those partners which we trained and advised and equipped and provided air support to and other kinds of support to with our special operators, were able to take the fight to ISIS and ultimately put ISIS essentially in a box at very low direct costs to the United States compared to putting tens of thousands of ground forces in as we did, for example, in Afghanistan. So that was the easy issue. The hardest one was the Syrian civil conflict the chemical weapons red line issue, I read about that rather dramatic period in the book. And I write that I was actually the one member of President, oh sorry, President Obama's cabinet and national security team that argued that we shouldn't seek congressional authorization. The president had been ready to go and decided somewhat at the 11th hour that it would be wiser to have Congress's backing because this could evolve into a more sustained commitment. And I advised against it not because I thought his logic was wrong, I thought his rationale made perfect sense but I didn't think he'd get congressional authorization. And maybe frankly some of the experience that I had in Benghazi sort of had soured me on the prospects of bringing Congress along. In this case, I assessed that the Republicans would wanna deny Obama anything he asked for even if they agreed with it. And I'd assessed that the Democrats would not wanna be caught voting for another Middle East military commitment. And the combination would doom the outcome. I argued that case but I had been elected to nothing much less twice. So I wasn't the legislative affairs director and we had three former senators sitting at the table. And so I conceded that they were probably better political judges than I. As it turned out, as I say in the book, I was right on the politics in my judgment but wrong on the policy. And I say I was wrong on the policy because at the end of the day failing to get congressional authorization we resorted to diplomacy. And diplomacy yielded long story short the removal and the destruction of 1300 metric tons of chemical weapons that were out of Syria. We thought we got the bulk of the stockpile we now don't know for sure because back then in 2017 and 2018 Assad used chemical weapons again. And President Trump took the target list that we had developed in 2013 off the shelf and over a course of a night he bombed those targets. And I supported that decision but it didn't yield anything in terms of changing circumstances on the ground. There was no diplomacy, there was no follow up. Whatever chemical weapons were there in 2017 and again in 2018 when those strikes were taken are still there and probably then some. So as a policy matter I have to concede that 1300 is better than zero. But neither is satisfactory because there's still chemical weapons there. So that's an illustration of really tough decisions that we wrestled with and that I don't think any thoughtful person can say with pure confidence that they're sure we got it right. You write very compellingly at least in my eye about the appeal of Barack Obama in 2008 looking at your experience with Obama and the administration for so many years looking back on that now what do you think his legacy will be is now perhaps and will be as time passes particularly in the arena of foreign affairs. Yeah it's gonna ask you to not make me prognosticate on domestic policy which is less my forte. I think what was unique about Obama's tenure was that he was able to really harness the effective cooperation of our allies and partners to achieve important global objectives. So when as I write in the book we faced the Ebola epidemic. President Obama rallied countries from around the world from Europe to China to Japan to Canada and many countries in Africa to help join with us as we deployed our own military personnel to contain that epidemic. The way we got the Paris climate agreement was through bilateral diplomacy with China and subsequently with India but also bringing the world to a common objective. That's how we got the Iran nuclear deal. That's how we had the nuclear security summit process which locked down huge quantities of what we colloquially call loose nuclear material. That's how we got the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. That's how we assembled a coalition of over 65 now over 70 countries to take the fight to ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. And so because the nature of the challenges we face are very rarely those that any one country even are one as powerful as our own can accomplish by acting in isolation or can succeed in acting in isolation. And because the costs and the burdens are best shared he understood that when we work with and leverage and support and value our alliances and partnerships, we're stronger. And at the time that seemed obvious. Not worthy of great emphasis. But in reality in retrospect it really wasn't that obvious not only because of what we're seeing now but also because we were coming out of a period where after the Iraq war our traditional alliances in Europe were already under strain. So there was some need to build back but also when I look back over the span of things that I'm most proud of many, many of them were a product of leadership that recognized that we were stronger and more effective in partnership with others and had the will and the ability to bring those partners to join us. Ambassador Rice there are several people in the audience tonight who are young people mostly UT students who perhaps aspire to careers in public service a career that looks something like yours. Well hopefully. These are tough times for that aspiration expertise professionals are being dragged through the mud on a daily basis what advice would you give to someone who wants to pursue a career that looks a little bit like yours? Well I first would say despite all of the ups and downs that I've experienced and all of the periods where it's been less than pleasant. I wouldn't trade my time in public service for anything is the most incredibly rewarding work. You're working on the most consequential important issues with really smart dedicated people who share a mission which is serving our nation and trying to make us safer and stronger and hopefully more respected. So it's a powerful calling. It's you know you wake up every day feeling like you're doing something that matters and you're doing it with high quality people. And so for all of those reasons I wouldn't trade it for anything. And I realize this is a really hard period. Particularly I never thought I'd see quite honestly our career civil servants foreign service officers career military officers. Being publicly pillory denigrated threatened by the president of the United States. I also never thought I'd see in that imaginable context the secretary of state failing to defend his own people. So it's not pleasant times. But I still would say to anybody who's considering a career in public service to do it. And I really believe that you know one of the silver linings coming out of this moment is that the American people are really seeing for the first time the skill and the commitment and the decency and the integrity of all of these nameless faceless public servants who don't make much money and put their lives at risk to serve. And they do so because they've sworn an oath to the constitution and they love this country and they do so at extraordinary personal risk not just physical risk but the kind of career risk reputational risk that we see individuals taking now. And I believe that that has in an odd way galvanized a collective sense of pride among those civil servants and foreign service officers and career military officers. And I hope that that sense of pride and that sense of duty will be a sustaining factor in this period of difficulty. There's a hashtag out there now that is trending at times and is known to all of us who ever worked in the State Department. And it's hashtag FS Proud, Foreign Service Proud. And I was not myself a Foreign Service Officer. I was a serial political appointee. But I'm very proud of the men and women of our foreign service and our civil service because I know the quality that they are and I know the commitment that they bring. And with new leadership, they're gonna be all right. Well, I'm quite certain I speak for many people in this audience when I say that you embody all of those characteristics so eloquently, eloquently. Ladies and gentlemen, the book is Tough Love, my story of the things worth fighting for and the brilliant author is Ambassador Susan Rice. Thank you so much for being with us.