 I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. And I am just simply delighted to see all of you here with us this evening. It is wonderful to see so many familiar faces and to have had the opportunity to meet some new friends of the school as well. Well, before I introduce our speakers this evening, it is a great pleasure to thank Mr. Glenn Goldberg, who was the president of McGraw Hills Financial Commodities and Commercial Markets for so graciously arranging this truly lovely venue for our event this evening. I also wanted to thank the City Foundation for their continued support of our lecture series. Well, tonight it is a great honor to introduce two very distinguished statesmen who served together in the Ford Administration, the Honorable Dr. Henry Kissinger and the Honorable Paul O'Neill. Well, you'll see from their biographies in the program that both of our speakers have had a number of key positions in both private sector and of course in public service as well. Dr. Kissinger is of course an icon in the fields of international relations and American foreign policy. A recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Kissinger is chairman of the international consulting firm Kissinger Associates. And he also served as the 56th Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to President Nixon and President Ford. Both a diplomat and a scholar, Dr. Kissinger's opinions continue to be sought after on matters of foreign policy and national security, as you well know. Dr. Kissinger also recently celebrated his 90th birthday and it is a great pleasure to wish him many happy returns on this occasion as well. Mr. O'Neill served as the 72nd Secretary of the Treasury. He joined the White House Office of Management and Budget in 1967 and served as the Deputy Director of OMB during the Ford Administration. He was Chairman and CEO of Alcoa until his retirement as well as Chairman of the Rand Corporation. Mr. O'Neill has been a very good friend to the Ford School as well and he was a leader among the generous donors who helped us to build the wonderful Wile Hall and just last month he delivered the charge to the class of 2013 and we very much appreciated that. Our students, our speakers have agreed to discuss their experiences serving in the Ford Administration and also their opinions on current events and issues that are extremely topical. But before they begin, I'd like to explain just very briefly why the Ford School has decided to host the event this evening. Well, as many of you know, 2013 marks the 100th anniversary of President Ford's birth. And tonight's event continues the Ford School's year-long celebration of President Ford's remarkable life and career. The naming of the University of Michigan School of Public Policy for President Ford in 1999 was really a key transformational event that linked us both to a great man whose decency and commitment to public service continues to inspire our students and broader members of our community today. But that naming also created an energy and a momentum that has allowed us to continue hiring top-tier faculty to launch an undergraduate degree program and to build Wile Hall. Well, now we are just a few months away from our next transformational effort and that is that in 2014 the Ford School will recognize another centennial, the 100th anniversary of our school's founding. This milestone arrives at the start of a university-wide effort to secure funds that will significantly enhance the student experience on campus and will invest in the next century of citizens, public servants and leaders trained at the Ford School. Well, many members of the Ford School committee who have helped us to set that path are in the room tonight and we're delighted to have them here with us. We hope that our commemoration of these back-to-back centennials will inspire all of you to join the Friends of the Ford School as active supporters in the coming months and the years of the campaign. Well, your printed program and the slideshow that played during the reception and I hope you had a chance to see a number of the pictures of our students and the activities in our facilities. They really highlight that year-long celebration and across all of these centennial events it has been a real pleasure to meet friends and colleagues of President Ford. I'd like to highlight that friends and colleagues description. President Ford's colleagues really continue to consider him a friend and whether it was across the aisle or across a nation, President Ford really had a gift for bringing people together. Dr. Kissinger, I think that you articulated that sentiment in the naming of the Ford School in 2000 and at that point you said and I quote that Washington is about power. It's very rare indeed it's unheard of that so many people who were associated with the Ford administration were friends then and have remained friends throughout the remainder of their lives. And here tonight we have two lifelong friends of President Ford. We also have an audience full of people whose own friendships began at the Ford School. And so Dr. Kissinger and Mr. O'Neill I think it's safe to say that that very important legacy of many of President Ford's is still alive and well. And now for the main event. Here is our format. Dr. Kissinger and Mr. O'Neill will start their conversation on the legacy of President Ford and then they will move on to a discussion of some of today's top policy issues. They'll save the last 20 minutes of the time for questions and answers and discussion with the audience. And so with no further ado it is my great honor to turn the floor over to Paul O'Neill. Thank you Dean Collins. It's really a pleasure to be here tonight. I should tell you Dr. Kissinger is wonderful in so many different ways. He's got a vocal cord problem so he's protecting his voice. But he was good enough even with this new thing that he's not old enough to have that he found his way here tonight. So it's so wonderful to see you Henry. I think it would be useful at the beginning maybe to pick up on a little conversation we were having before we came in. Henry if you first and then I will follow you talk a little bit about President Ford the man that you worked with them and how you saw him then and see him in retrospect. Well I've known ten presidents and one of the main characteristics of presidents is that they spent a great deal of their life in pursuit of the office. And so whatever their differences they're very conscious of public opinion. They're very concerned increasingly as time has gone on this was not so true. I would say of Eisenhower but they're very concerned with such things as focus groups and Ford never expected to be present. Never thought to be present. He was transported into it by a catastrophe and the expectations were not high because he had had no executive experience. And he took over at a moment when the administration was in a shambles opposition internationally extremely difficult because so much depends on credibility and countries from all over the world looking at him to see what he might do next. The outstanding characteristic of President Ford was that what you saw was what you got. You did not have to worry. He did not maneuver. He did not care about focus groups. One of the actually big mistakes we made in that sense. I told him at in there was an April 76 before most of you were born. There was an issue in Southern Africa. And I said to him we have to put ourselves on the side of majority rule in Rhodesia and Namibia. And I said I would Secretary of State. I said I'm planning to go there. And whenever they did and I realized that this is two weeks before the Texas primary. And if you want me to I can put it off a few months. He said no we're not making the foreign policy dependent on my primary. And the primary was a disaster because in Texas they were not for majority rule in Rhodesia and Namibia in those days. But he made strong decisions. He created a warm atmosphere. He had no obsessions about camera angles. All the things you read about now. It was not a rehearsed presidency. It was a Midwest figure who did what he thought was best for his country. And as I said I've known ten presidents. This is not to talk them down. They all were men of substance. But Ford was in the human category by himself. And as it turned out well equipped for the job because he had been on the armed services committee. So he knew a lot about the security aspect of foreign policy. And one of the, again from the foreign policy side interesting things is as a Midwestern from relatively small town. He was exactly the sort of guy that European intellectual leaders might look down on as naive. But as it turned out he became a close personal friend of people like Helmut Schmidt. This guy is saying through the rest of his life when he could do nothing for them. But they went all the way out to Denver or to Aspen year after year through Doe from Canada who was, if I may say so, somewhat snobbish. He became a good friend. But when we get to the questions I'd be glad to answer. Well good. So let me reminisce just a little bit as well about my connection with President Ford. I was a graduate student in public policy at Indiana University. It's another place you may have heard of. And I came into the government actually in 1961. It sounds maybe naive now but, you know, and Kennedy said if you want to make a difference come here and help. So I did. I didn't know that you weren't supposed to respond. So I went, you know. And fortunately I got recruited into what was the Bureau of Budget in January of 1967 because President Johnson at the time called in the director of the Bureau of Budget and said to Charlie Schultz-Charlie, I really like what Bob McNamara is doing at the Defense Department with cost benefit analysis and program planning and budgeting. And I want you to bring those ideas to the domestic activities of the government. And so Charlie set out to hire some people with backgrounds in economics and operations research. And I was one of those people that got recruited to come and help install the McNamara ideas in the domestic part of government. So in a parallel track, President Ford served 25 years in the Congress and he was there 25 years, served 23 years on the Appropriations Committee. And he was fascinated by the appropriations process because it gave him a way to relate how we were spending our money on different things. And he became arguably the best educated programmatic expert about government that we've had for a president. Harry Truman had some similar claims because of his time in the Congress. But a lot of young people especially do not understand what a thoughtful, knowledgeable person President Ford was about everything the government was doing. And so when he was still vice president, I'll never forget he called me in and said he wanted me to explain the economics of clover leafs on interstate highway systems and what kind of businesses would be attracted and what would happen to property values. That's how his mind worked. He was not an idle kind of observer of what was going on. He was into the details and he wanted to understand the facts of what programs worked, why they worked, which ones didn't work. And so when he became president and asked me to be the deputy director of OMB, you know, in that 29 months I must have spent 300 hours sitting at the corner of his desk talking with him, others present, whatever their specialties were, discussing how to allocate resources against all the competing needs in the federal government. And, you know, I'll never forget one night about 10 o'clock after we've been at it for what seemed like forever. There was a line, I'll never forget, $15 million increase for retired military pay. And he said to me, Paul, why is this $15 million here? And I said, you know, Mr. President, I don't remember. And he loved the fact I didn't know the answer to a question because I thought it was my God-given duty to know the answer to every question he could ask before he could think to ask it. He never let me forget the $15 million retired military budget increase that I didn't remember. We changed the assumption about actuarial things, and that's what produced the $15 million. But he was unbelievably interested in the details and the depth, and, you know, I said in the case when I was at the Ford School, he would be appalled to hear people talking about deciding what percent of GDP we ought to spend on national defense. Because he knew how many people we needed in each of the uniform services from an analysis of threats and working with Dr. Kissinger and his own accumulation of knowledge over time. He knew how many aircraft we needed. He knew how much money we ought to spend on investments and new technology. A lot of the technology we have now, the stealth bombers, they came out of his administration's investment in research and development. And he understood at the same time that money we spent on national security issues was money we couldn't spend on other important public policy needs. So he weighed all those things really carefully. I tell you, it was the greatest experience to work with someone so clear-headed and devoted to the country and to doing the right thing. You know, I never ever in the time I spent with President Ford saw him diminish another human being by his word or by his action. He was an uplifter of people. You know, just a fabulous, wonderful person. And I take personal pride in the fact that the school is now the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Because I honestly think it is the most meaningful, lasting recognition of his life. Because young people hopefully will carry his values forward from the training they get at the Ford School at the University of Michigan. So, Henry, we should talk about current affairs. And I said to you earlier, I'm sure this audience is knowledgeable about everything that's going on. But I personally would like to hear your thoughts on the situation in Syria, which is, you know, I was thinking about this coming over. Maybe it's a function of getting old, but it used to be, I think you could name the hotspots in the world where things were unraveling and there was civil unrest. I think you have to have an Excel spreadsheet now. There are so many of them. So, Henry, talk to us about Syria. Well, that's the problem of Syria and that's the problem of the United States. And I put it that way because we have great difficulty understanding societies like the Syrian society. And we have great problems as a country of understanding the relationship between diplomacy and power and democracy. And therefore, if I taught a course on policymaking, I always would say you begin with an analysis. You have to begin explaining where you are. And then you have to follow it with objectives. Where are you and what are you trying to do? And then you have, of course, to discuss the means. But we have had great trouble about Syria in this sense. When we see Syria on a map, we say, OK, it's a country that needs border. First of all, Syria is not a historic state. It was created in its present shape in 1920. And it was given that shape in order to facilitate the control of the country by France, which happened to be half the UN mandate. The neighboring country, Iraq, was also given an art shape that was to facilitate control by England. And the shape of both of the countries was designed to make it hard for either of them to dominate the region. So we could start with that, dealing with the United States that has a founding father and a long history. Secondly, it's a country that is divided into many ethnic groups, a multiplicity of ethnic groups. And that means that it is very, you can't, an election doesn't give you the same results as the United States, because every ethnic group votes for its own people. So you write back to where you started. You don't get a national consensus. Moreover, these ethnic groups are very antagonistic to each other. So you have Kurds, Druzes, Alawites, Sunnis, but they're about 10 to 12 Christians ethnic groups. And they've been governed for the last 20 years by the Alawite minority, which is about 13%. But most of the army, or much of the army, is Alawite because Alawites were in the poor region and therefore joining the army was a way of coming up in the world. So even they had only 13% of the population, they had 80% of the army. You don't understand what's going on unless you understand that. In addition, most of the other minorities supported the Alawites only because they were afraid of the Sunnis, not because they liked the Alawites. And the Assats are, of course, an Alawite military family. For the current Assat who is there, one can have this degree of sympathy. He started out in life as an optimologist. The height of his ambition was to practice ophthalmology. He didn't want to govern in Syria. He was in London for four years with his wife, practicing his profession. When his brother, who was supposed to succeed the father, was killed in an automobile accident and he was brought back to Syria. So he's described in our media as the bad guy and that's largely true, but he's also incompetent and unsuited for that office on those grounds because you have to assume if you make ophthalmology your profession. This is not that you're driven by a huge hunger for power. So then the revolution breaks out. And in the American press it's described as a conflict between democracy and a dictator. And the dictator is killing his own people and we've got to punish him. But that's not what's going on. It may have been started by a few Democrats, but on the whole it is an ethnic and sectarian conflict. And one had to add another thing, the other whites are Shiites. And so that's enmeshed in the historic Shiite-Sunni conflict. So however it started and whatever happened in the first three weeks, it is now a civil war between sectarian groups. And I have to say we have misunderstood it from the beginning. If you read our media they say we've got to get rid of Assad and if we get rid of Assad then we form a coalition government. Inconceivable. I mean, I'm all in favor of getting rid of Assad. But the dispute between us and the Russians on that issue was that the Russians say you start with getting rid of not just Assad, that's not the issue, but you break up the state administration. And you'll wind up like in Iraq that there is nothing to hold it together. And then you'll have an even worse civil war. So this is how that mess has taken the present form. There's three possible outcomes. One Assad victory, a Sunni victory or an outcome in which the various nationalities agree to coexist together but in more or less autonomous regions so that they can't oppress each other. That's the outcome I would prefer to see. That's the one, but that's not the popular view. I don't see, if you put either of these sectarian groups in charge, there'll be a bloodbath while. And so if one wants a humane outcome, I also think Assad ought to go, but I don't think it's the key. The key is it's like Europe after the Thirty Years' War when the various Christian groups had been killing each other until they finally decided that they had to live together but in separate units. So that is the fundamental issue. We're beginning to move towards that, but it's going to be very tough on top of it. It's the fact that the Iranian problem, the Iranians have a quasi-terrorist, a terrorist force in Lebanon, which is Shiite. They have now intervened on the Al-Awaid, namely Shiite side, and then you have a Kurdish unit in the north that wants to break off. It is a really tough issue. And I think we're now beginning to head towards a conference, but what is almost inconceivable to me is that you can form a national coalition government where they then govern together and have their writ run through the whole country. What will probably happen is that the country will lose its unitary character. That has also problems because it may risk that one of these units gets captured by terrorists. And the terrorists are already very active, the head fuller on the Shiite side and various Al-Qaeda groups. So that's an inscription of the situation what the United States can do now. I think we're trying to head it in the direction that I described. But we have to define an outcome. Nobody knows what we really want that can be achieved. And so until we do that and then line up some other countries with us, it's going to be very amorphous. So Henry, let me do a follow-up question with you. When you look around the world and you see North Korea and you see China, which you've written a lot about. If you haven't read the China book, it's worth the effort. So we have Iran, we have Iraq, we have Afghanistan, we have Syria. It's interesting. We have civil unrest in Brazil. We have civil unrest in Greece. And the problems exist in different places for different reasons. But my question to you is this. Is there something that you would prescribe that we need to do as a nation to better live in this world of what seems like increasing instability? Are there different approaches we could take in our foreign policy and our economic policy that would promise more hope for the coming generation? I'll answer the question in a minute. I want to pick out of the list of topics you mentioned one about which I'm beginning to be a little optimistic, which is the least probable, namely North Korea, that it's probably the worst regime that exists anywhere in the world, the most brutal, the most exploitative. Every house has a radio which they can't shut off so that the government can talk to them 24 hours a day. And they have impoverished their people and submitted them to salvation or to get nuclear weapons. And I think now we in China are coming together on that nuclear issue with North Korea. And if that happens, then we may see an evolution that will make it very tough for that regime to continue as it is. But the fundamental question you asked is there's so much turmoil in the world. What's the reason? Well, this is the first period in history where every part of the world affects every other part and where they can watch it being affected. So, therefore, events have a tendency of multiplying in a way that wasn't conceivable before. The Roman Empire, which was a great empire, and the Chinese Empire existed in almost total ignorance of each other. They knew there was something there, but they had next to no contact. And this went on until the beginning of the 19th century. Then the Europeans took over the world as a colonial system. But this is the first time now that you have different parts of the world with their own identity acting in a way that others with their identity have to react to. And that's, as a multiplier effect, built into it. Secondly, the nature of the modern communication system facilitates the coming together of groups that share nothing except their resentments. So that creates a quest for excitement and for not looking for solutions, but looking for some event and for some fulfillment. So you now have non-state actors, like these terrorist groups, but also others that have tremendous impact in their society so that governments get preoccupied with dealing with these groups. Then there's an issue that I personally believe, but your generation will probably resent. I think that the way that the people who are educated by the Internet have a different mind than the others because they can get their information in bits and pieces. They don't have to reflect about it in the traditional way. So when you look at the leaders that emerge all over the world, they're hugely sensitive to public opinion, even when they're dictators, they take constant polls. Then you have societies, take China now. They could have moved 400 million people from the countryside into the cities. First, that's a huge technological infrastructure problem. But secondly, if history teaches anything, it is that when peasants leave the countryside and move into apartment houses and into cities, they change their values from the countryside values to city values. But how can any government know ahead of time which direction that takes? Now you see all of this evolution, you mentioned Brazil. What also seems to be happening is when you look at the per capita income, when these development projects start, they're mostly about infrastructure. That's big and you can have huge programs. But once you get per capita income above 6,000, you have a lot of little enterprises which are uncontrollable by total planning. I was meeting with a group the other day about China and we always read about the SOE's government supported and sponsored enterprises. To my amazement, it emerged that there are only 400 of those that are run by the central government and 123,000 that are run by local government, cities, provinces. That produces automatically. Now in states that are less disciplined, so you have a lot of turmoil around the world. But on the positive side, of course, mankind has never had such a tremendous explosion of real estate being as you have now. Henry, I think they want us to see if we can take a few questions from the audience. So I wonder if we could do that now. Yes. Today, President Obama was in Berlin and discussing the potential to shut down Guantanamo and I'd like to know what both of your thoughts are and where you think we might best serve moving those prisoners. I have not, my basic instincts have not thought it through because when I see pictures of Guantanamo, I'm not thrilled by it. On the other hand, here we have, usually in a war, you take prisoners and you return them when the war ends. This is a war that doesn't end. And we have found that maybe 70% of the prisoners we have released have come back to terrorist activities. So you've got to put them somewhere. And when the President was considering closing it right away, they were exploring various state prisons, federal prisons. Nobody wanted them. No state wanted them. And you'd have colossal other problems if you help people. Of course, if there are mistakes made, then it's a tragedy. But the criticism isn't mistakes usually, almost invariably, these are people connected with terrorist activities. So I'd prefer another solution. But if nobody can come up with another solution, I'd rather keep it than abolish it and turn them all loose again. Okay. This is your connecting back to China and before President Ford, and when you were in the Nixon administration, and the opening to China occurred in striking way after a president who was deceived as anti-China, anti-communist, perception was what happened, nothing like that would ever happen. And reminisce with us a bit about how that came about, opening with China. And then if you review the role of China in the modern world now, there's a big question in terms of the future of China in the global geopolitical scene. Well, Nixon was an anti-communist ideologically, but he was also a great patriot. And he looked at the international situation from the point of view of what does the country need now. When he took over, the country had been for four and a half years in the Vietnam War. It had already suffered 35,000 casualties. And he thought his job was on the one hand to bring the war to an end, but on the other to give the American people a positive vision of the world. Other than just ending a war, and he concluded that here were 800, at that time China had 800 million people that were not part of the world anymore, and that it was essential to bring them into the international system. So he made that decision fairly, very early in his term. But we didn't know how to do it at first, because the Chinese were in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, and they had called all their diplomats back. There was only one embassy in Europe, in Warsaw, where we occasionally had contact with them. So the first problem we had was, how do you reach the top level Chinese? We thought at first we'd go to the most independent-minded communists we knew, which were the Romanians, who had been hostile to Brezhnev. So we went to the Romanians, and they did send messages. But the Chinese didn't trust any communists, even though they were the gels, but they didn't trust any communists, that was related to Moscow. So I wouldn't go through all the highways we had to go. We finally went to the Pakistanis, who we knew had relations with them, and we sent a message via the Pakistanis that we wanted to talk. And up to that point there had been a contact in Warsaw, at which there had been 167 meetings, distinguished by the fact that they had made no progress whatsoever, because each side raised all kinds of technical problems. The thing for which the Nixon administration deserves special credit is that they say, let's grab all these. We want to discuss the basic relationship. So we exchanged, and the way we exchanged messages was like from a spy story. We are used to texting. In those days, they wrote out their messages to us by hand and delivered them in Pakistan. And Pakistan then sent a messenger or envoy over with a message. We answered, typed on unmarked, unsigned, unaddressed paper. So if the Chinese showed it, we could deny it. And so this went on for nearly three years until we came together. And I was sent to Beijing as the envoy of the President. And I was sitting there for 40 hours without any communication. And I could have finished the Nixon presidency if I screwed up. But there was one maybe amusing aspect to this. Every visitor going to China was dying to see Mao. My problem was the opposite. I knew that Nixon wanted to be the first person to meet Mao. And so I find myself in Beijing. And we now know from the records that Mao had given instructions that the minute I asked to see him, I should be proud of him. And he didn't want to be in a position of asking me to see him. So he had given those instructions. But I never asked. So I must be the first person who went to Beijing refusing. So I saw Chow and Lai as my major person I dealt with until after the Nixon visit. After that I met Mao five times. So it was a very convoluted process. But our basic conviction was you cannot have peace in the world if a large percentage of the human population is not exchanging ideas with the other. And if you look at the records of our conversations, the first four or five meetings that I conducted there sound like college professors exchanging views about history because we had decided let's put all the technical issues like planes and assets and all the issues that divided. I spent most of my time saying here is what we think about foreign policy and about the world. And I made an effort to give him a very accurate account so that if something happened on a day basis they had a basis for comparison. And as it turned out we were lucky that Chow and Lai also did the same thing. And what it shows is if you ask me the basic principle of negotiation should be not to haggle about what causes the disagreement but to make sure that each side understands where the other one comes from. Because then they can, I don't know whether you'd agree with that in business, but what I've learned from that I usually begin a negotiation by telling the opposite number what I want to achieve and why. Because then it certainly is in the Chinese case turned out to be the right approach. So Dr. Kissinger you haven't talked about the Iranian nuclear program yet. I see that as one of the biggest issues we've got to deal with. What should we do and what do you think is going to happen? The huge issue, first we have said now together with five other permanent members of the Security Council for 15 years that this is unacceptable. And for 15 years we have said that no method is off the table. Now if suddenly they emerge with nuclear weapons our position would be very, very difficult. Secondly if Iran, the process of nuclear proliferation must stop because if it continues when I think of what was required in a two-power nuclear world in terms of warning systems, safety systems, protecting command and control to prevent a war. And then you imagine 50 countries maneuvering simultaneously without the technology. It's almost guaranteed that a nuclear war somewhere will start which could produce hundreds of thousands of casualties. In hours when you look at my 11 it discompopulated us but there were only 3,000 dead, no wounded, no damage to infrastructure. It was bad enough so this is one thing. Secondly Iran is right now supporting many terrorist groups all over the world. If they now on top of it have nuclear weapons and feel protected. Third they have already proclaimed that they want to exterminate Israel but I would urge those of you who want to understand how Shiite theologians think. They really believe they are fulfilled. I'm not saying they want to die in a nuclear war but they have fewer restraints than most others. So I think keeping, if Iran moves to its nuclear weapons it's very probable that Israel will attack or very likely. So what happens? I would say we are in the last year where you can still say a negotiation can conceivably succeed because with every year they are accumulating more and more visible material. But every year it becomes harder to see whether they are building nuclear warheads and most scientists believe that if, I don't know, 6 months, 9 months if they keep accumulating visible material it will be almost impossible to trace it back. So we will see what happens now but if nothing happens the president will have to make some really tough decisions but we cannot want to be in another war but we cannot want them to have nuclear weapons either. Do you have any thoughts on the deadlock in Congress? Oh, you know, I was in government. I thought life was rough but in those days you still had committee chairman. Don't you think, Paul, 3 or 4 times a year you could go to them and say, look, this is not a partisan issue, the country needs it and I would say 60 to 70% of the time you could have a bipartisan outcome. That doesn't seem to be happening now and I don't know, theoretically you would like a more bipartisan approach but the way campaigns are now conducted people need so much money that they get financed more by pressure groups. In the House which has 432 seats, maybe 50 of them are contested. All the others are so completely in the hands of one party. I've seen statistics, I may be wrong, but when Ford ran for the presidency I think over 20 states were considered contested. Now it's 6 to 8, all the others. So that puts tremendous emphasis on divisiveness in those states where you're trying to move the few, I don't know what the answer is. It's deeply concerning. So I'm going to have the final word, Henry. I think the answer is we're one great leader away from regaining our balance. So what do I mean by that? Our system, if you go back to the time we spent together in the government Richard Nixon, a Republican created the Environmental Protection Agency the OSHA for worker safety, reopened our country to China proposed the first negative income tax for you young people you probably don't know what that means but it was an unbelievably progressive idea in the late 1960s and early 1970s and Wilbur Mills was then the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee hadn't decided he wanted to run for president we probably would have gotten rid of a whole lot of things that still persist and have a clean, straightforward, simple way to provide economics assistance to low income people. So I think where we are is largely a function of leadership or not leadership God knows there are things we need to do so I end on that note on a public policy note that was one of the reasons I got fired it was clear to me and has been for a long time we need fundamental tax reform in our country so I'll tell you a few facts right now our tax system is such a mess in the way it's designed that it's significantly unenforceable and so by best estimates we're under collecting taxes that in theory are due and owing to the tune of $400 billion a year and it cost us some place between $300 and $400 billion a year on a total economic impact basis to our people to administer this tax system so do you think we're smart enough to engineer a tax system that collects the money we need in a clear straightforward, simple, fair way that collects the money we need to pay for agreed public purposes without a $700 billion hole I personally believe it's a really significant issue in not just an economic efficiency but I think if you look at societies that unravel or have difficulty going forward you know a significant reason is because the people are really not attached to their government so if you look at some European countries that have fallen on hard times the national sport is tax avoidance or evasion and so at that most fundamental level of connection where we're all somehow connected to the fabric of government we've got what I believe is proof positive that we deal with every day in our tax system that we're not an intelligent people because intelligent people wouldn't have the system so Henry would you like to end with some humor? you have a wonderful sense of humor Henry is, I tell you what if you don't know about Henry's humorous quotes you need to go on Google and read about power but this is like an event that occurred to me once where a lady came up to me at the reception and said, I understand you're a fascinating man she said, fascinate me so... well sir I think it is fair to say that your candor and your insights have certainly fascinated all of us and so I would like to, before I again thank our very special guests this evening I'd like to thank all of you for joining us here we have been delighted to have you join us but it is a special pleasure to again thank Dr. Kissinger and Mr. O'Neill for their candid insights we clearly face a huge number of policy challenges in so many arenas and I think this conversation has elucidated them in a number of very important ways we very much appreciate you sharing generously your perspectives and your insights so please join me in again thanking our very special guests