 and welcome to tonight's event. I'm absolutely thrilled to see so many of you in spite of the not so pleasant weather today. My name is Eva Paus. I'm a professor of economics and the Carol Hoffman Collins director of the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives here at the college, one of the sponsors of tonight's events. The other sponsors are the departments of politics and international relations, the Center for the Weissmann Center for Leadership, and of course the Odyssey Bookshop. There are two people here without whom tonight's event would not happen in addition to the two people on stage. And they are Joan Garnier, the owner of the Odyssey Bookshop and Linda Chesky Fernandez, the sole of the International Relations and Politics Department. After the conversation tonight, there will be mics in the aisle, so we have opportunities for you will have opportunity to ask questions. And after the Q&A, Secretary Kerry will sign books over here on the right. And this may be a good moment to remind you to please turn off your cell phones. It is my great privilege and honor to introduce tonight's event. The speakers really need no introduction. John Kerry's autobiography is the subject matter of tonight's conversation, so it would be foolish for me to provide a synopsis of the major achievements of our longtime Massachusetts senator and then Secretary of State in the Obama administration. And you all know John Weston, our dean of the faculty and the Carol Hoffman Collins Professor of International Relations, who has a long time teaching and research interests in human rights, post-conflict society, and international security. So instead, I want to take a moment to highlight an important characteristic or character trait that the two Johns share and that is so desperately needed in today's challenging times, moral courage, or as we say in German, civil courage. Moral courage is the courage to speak out and to act for moral reasons, well-knowing the risk of adverse consequences. In the early 1990s, John Weston worked as the Balkans analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department. He became increasingly critical of US policy in the area. And on August 6, 1993, he resigned very publicly from the State Department over the US government's policy towards Bosnia and its implicit tolerance of war crimes. 25 years earlier when serving in Vietnam, John Kerry came to experience firsthand the insanity of US policy there. Upon returning to the US, he became an outspoken critic of the war and a very public spokesperson for VEAW, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In his now famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971, Kerry said, and I quote, we could be quiet. We could hold our silence. We could not tell what went on in Vietnam. But we feel because of what threatens this country, not the Reds, but the crimes that we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out, end quote. We're very fortunate that John Kerry has continued to speak out in his autobiography of his office vivid testimony to that effect. We are very fortunate to have him here tonight and please join me in welcoming Dean Weston and Secretary Kerry. Thank you, Professor Pows, for that very generous introduction. And thank you, Secretary Kerry, for spending some time with us this evening. And I want to thank all of you for coming out on this rainy day, rainy evening. And we really appreciate your attendance here this evening. I'd like to start this evening with a description of Mount Holyoke College. Mount Holyoke is the oldest continuing women's college in the country. It was founded in 1837 by Mary Lyon. Members of our community are very passionate. We have 180-year history of educating and empowering women and girls in the community around us and fighting against all forms of stereotyping, gender stereotyping. You've been in the news recently in an exchange with President Trump and Secretary Pompeo on Iran. And we'll get to the discussion about Iran and foreign policy in a few minutes. But I want to begin briefly just with a comment that was made recently in a Bill Maher interview in which you described President Trump as insecure as a teenager. And I believe that you share our concerns in about gender stereotyping. And I'm wondering if you'd comment a little bit about that. Well, whether you should. Look, I understand. I'm, first of all, let me just say thank you all for coming out tonight. Thank you for being here. I'm very privileged and honored to be here at Mount Holyoke. I've admired for years this college's extraordinary education base and participation in the community. And I might add, in a number of my elections. So thank you very much. And none of you look 180 years old. So I want you to know you're doing OK. Yeah, I was pretty shocked that day, actually, when President Trump saw a fit to tweet and Twitter about me. And I responded pretty directly. But it seemed to me, first of all, I was an immature eight-year-old boy. So I thought I had a right to say something about myself in that context. And I raised two extraordinary daughters, both of whom, obviously, were teenagers for a period of time. And they're now the most strong, remarkable, incredible citizens and young women. And I'm so proud of them. So I thought I was sort of touching on permissible territory as an experienced father. But that said, the point I was really trying to make is no 72-year-old president of the United States should behave like a child. That was the point I was really trying to make. And let's face it, we all know young folks have a hard-roll period without any gender attachments to it. And I think that the best thing one can do is probably not compare them at all to Donald Trump. That's an injustice, given that life is hard enough without that. So I've retired the comparison. And you won't hear it again. That said, at least with a gender attachment, that said, I want you to know I'm as that proud father of two young daughters, one of whom is a critical care physician at Mass General Hospital and has started a global health program called Seed Global Health. And she's out in the world in five African countries now building health care capacity for those countries, not just treating people, but making sure that after a year of doctors from America coming over to teach them, they're building the capacity for themselves, which is leaving something lasting. And I'm very proud of her. She's in New York this week at the UN General Assembly. My other daughter is in the creative world. She's been a filmmaker and is currently working on content in this new world of so many different platforms. So they're fabulous. And they let me off the hook a few times. Let me just say also, but I'm proud of this. I want to tell you all that I share with you, because I've been a powerful advocate for breaking the ceilings and dealing with what we need to do in this country. It is still incomprehensible to me that women are underpaid compared to men. It is incomprehensible to me. We have only 25 CEOs of 500 different Fortune 500 companies. It's wrong that we still have. When I came to the Senate, there were as many female United States senators as I had daughters. And one of them lost the race the next time out, so we had one. Now that's changed. 20 something, I forget the number. But still not enough. When I was Secretary of State, I was determined to change that. And so I appointed the first ever Deputy Secretary of State as a woman. And five of my six Assistant Secretaries of State were women, and four of my six Under Secretaries of State were women. That's unprecedented. And we broke the ceiling. So I'm very sensitive to the stereotypes and the caricatures. And obviously, we need to end them. I hope and pray that in this midterm election, I have high expectations that there will be a wave of women candidates elected across the country who will go down and make sure that we do the things that the men in Washington and the House and Senate are not getting done. And I hope that will happen. And looking out in the audience, I see a lot of future senators, House members, presidents of this country, and many others. So I'd like to start a discussion about your book with a quote from the afterward in the book. You write, and I'm quoting here, all of the recounting and retelling also reminded me that the world has always been complicated, truly complicated, that the fight at home has always been a struggle. And from that, you conclude, that is what makes me all the more optimistic about today. Because I've seen with my own eyes that the institutions the founders created to hold America together have worked best when America needed them most. So my question is, why are you so confident that American institutions will prevail? And is democracy self-executing? No, democracy is clearly absolutely not self-executing. And we cannot, any of us, believe that this great nation of ours and its democracy are an automatic pilot. We are not. Democracy anywhere and everywhere requires huge participation. And I will get to the why I am optimistic. But I want to say a word about this, because it's really at the center of what motivated me to write the book. And motivates me to be here tonight and to not retire and to be engaged in public life, because nobody can retire right now. We have to save our country. And I mean that quite literally. When I look at climate change, when I look at extremism, I look at the transition taking place in so many different respects in life, we have a lot of fighting to do. But folks, let me just say to everybody here, we have tried, for you students of history particularly, and political science, every form of government that I think can be tried. Go back to ancient times. I mean, go back to the Roman Empire, go back to the Greeks, to the beginning of democracy, go back to the various empires that controlled life for so much, go back to the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, and so forth, the Renaissance, the Reformation. You can go through it all, the Age of Reason. All of it has been the development of humankind's capacity to think and to adopt a set of values by which we live. And we in America are one of the latest experiments when you think about it. And it came out of the debates in France, Rousseau, Voltaire, the rights of man, Thomas Paine, blah, blah, blah, you know that sort of routine. But it's not to be trifled with. It's not to be just sort of not casually put aside. Human beings have always been on this search for meaning in life and what is the virtuous life? What is the way in which we should conduct ourselves? And I think we Americans have landed on something pretty special. I really believe that, despite the fact that we still have too much racism and too much resistance to women and discrimination and all the other components of our society. But we've tried them, folks. We've had despots. We've had dictators of the worst order. We've had benevolent dictatorships. We've had despotic, malevolent dictatorships. We've had monarchies of all form and shape. We've had constitutional monarchy, parliamentary monarchy. We've had constitutional presidency, presidential government, non-presidential government, parliamentary government, communism, socialism, and far-right fascist dictatorships. We've done it all. And as Winston Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government in the world, except for everything else. That's where we are. I'm telling you, that's where we are. Now, why am I optimistic? I'll tell you why I'm optimistic, because we've been there. I was there. Many of you, I'm looking around. I see a few gray hairs here. You guys were part of this. Back in 1968, when I came back from Vietnam, in fact, before 68, my freshman year at college, we almost had a war with the Soviet Union over Cuba. My sophomore year, I was sitting on a bench in the Harvard Yale game. And we started hearing a ripple in the audience, which I write about that President Kennedy had been shot. That turned into a day on the weekend and months of mourning, because he was dead. That's what I learned in the middle of that game. I couldn't even remember who won the game. I had to look it up, go back to the Yale Daily News when I wrote this book. And the next year, we had the Civil Rights Movement, with dogs chewing at people, the Edmund Bettis Bridge, and Bull Connor, and people couldn't vote in America. And they were still being lynched in trees in the South. And I remember getting in a car with my friend driving down the South in the spring vacation and seeing my first ever whites-only sign, no colored, and so forth. And one year later, we were all confronting with Vietnam. Life was going to change. Some people went to Canada. Some people went to jail. People made different choices. When I signed up, it was 1965. Tonkin Gulf had just happened. And I was the son of a World War II parents, which I described in the book. So I had a sense of service, a sense of duty and responsibility about it. But those were the four years of education, which then translated into 1968 when Medgar Evers was assassinated and Martin Luther King was assassinated and then Robert Kennedy was assassinated. And then we had pipe bombs going off in various communities of America and we had people with machine guns and people being kidnapped and people in Detroit, the community burning. You remember all those of you who were there? That's the memory. We had a president in the United States who was attacking the Justice Department, had an enemy's list and was ultimately proved to be a crook and violated every notion of decency. So what did we do? We didn't crawl up under a rock. We didn't go home and say we can't do anything. Granted, we didn't have to contend with platforms of communication that have so altered the flow of facts and that's something else we have to get to. But we confronted this. And I remember the first thing I did when I came back from Vietnam, John, was not demonstrate against the war because I was trying to figure out how do you do, what do you do? There were uncertainties. Until as I write in my book, I got a letter about one of my best friends at Vietnam being killed, about three weeks after I got back. And I write about that and I quote a lot from the letter. By the way, this book is not a secretary of state policy tome. This book is a journey. It's an American journey. And I'm very proud to tell you that last night I was in New York, spoke at a big dinner there in conjunction with the UN stuff. And Tina Brown, maybe you may know of and remember from her leadership of many major magazines in America including the New Yorker, which she more recently edited. And she said publicly at the thing. She said, you know, I thought this book was gonna be a skim. And I dug into it and I've read every word of it. I couldn't put it down. Because she said it was so vivid, it was so clear. She actually called it brilliant. Now I'm not gonna assert that. But I let you be your own judge. I think this book is worth the read. And I think people are finding that as they go along. And the reason I say that is I lay it all out there folks. I talk about the early years failures. I talk about a failed marriage. I talk about what it was like to lose an election coming back from the war. How you pick yourself up after losing presidency by one state. And I think there's some grist in there. I got a letter today from a guy in Rhode Island. I know I'm diverting. But I just, he told me he'd lost an election. He didn't know what to do. He was reading my book and he felt better about life as a result, which is great. If that alone comes to you, that's pretty good. I wanna come back to what I'm saying, optimism. What I did when I came back was get involved in Earth Day, 1970. We brought 20 million Americans out of their homes because they didn't wanna live next to a toxic waste site. They didn't wanna drink water that made them sick. They didn't wanna see the Cuyahoga River in Ohio lighting on fire. Spontaneously, as it did. And so, we didn't stop with the day we brought them out. We politicized it. We made it into a quest to make the environment a voting issue. And we succeeded beyond our dreams. We targeted the 12 worst votes in the United States Congress on the environment. We labeled them the dirty dozen. In the next election, 1972, seven of the 12 lost their seats. And I'm telling you, as a 28-year veteran of the Senate, thanks to all of you or many of you, there is nothing that stiffens the spine of the survivors more than the loss of some of their colleagues. It works. And that's what happened. We passed the Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, Coastal Zone Management Act. We actually got Richard Nixon to sign the EPA into a law. America didn't have an Environmental Protection Agency till then. So we made things happen. And my message to you tonight is this. Our system is broken, badly broken. But it's not broken because the institutions themselves won't let us do things. It's not broken because the rules are stacked against us, though there are things stacked against us because of laws that have been passed. It is broken because there's too much money in American politics stealing the agenda from average people and because of gerrymandering, which denies us a legitimate election in November. So we don't have a democracy. Now, how do you get that back? I'll tell you how you get it back. You make, you politicize, you have to make these things voting issues. And here's the most telling thing of all. I want you to remember the magic number, 54.2. That's the percentage of our fellow Americans who are eligible to vote who saw fit to go out and vote. Can you imagine that? When I ran and lost in 2004, we had 60.3% turnout. When Barack Obama won in 2008, we had 62.3%. Still not enough, but you see the difference. The story of what we have going on in America today is not the story of those people who elected this president. It is the story of the people who did not come out and vote. That's the story. And so, why am I optimistic? I'm optimistic because we're doing things on this planet we never dreamed we'd do. We're curing diseases we never thought we'd cure. Smallpox, polio, TV, we're now doing highly specialized individualized cancer treatments for people because of the genome. We're on the brink of having the first generation of children born AIDS free in Africa because of what America has done with respect to antiretroviral drugs and PEPFAR. That's what comes in. We stopped Ebola in its tracks. When we were told in the Situation Room of the White House, a million people are gonna die in the next four months. We said no. We sent 4,000 American troops over to West Africa. We worked with the British and the French. Each took a country and a tiny fraction of that million actually died and we stopped Ebola where we wanted to stop it. We can do things. I would say to you, I mean, if you were a woman in the world today, yes. We have about 300,000 women a year who die in childbirth. That's 300,000 too many. But guess what? We are 50% more likely that a woman will not die in childbirth than they were 10 years ago. We're 50% more likely that a child is gonna live and go to school and be fed. We have 450 million Chinese who have come out of poverty and are now in the middle class. 400 million Indians run around to countries. South Korea. South Korea 15 years ago was receiving aid from us and other developed countries. Today, South Korea is giving aid to other countries. So I am an optimist because we've been through this before in our own country. We went through terrible times with the Red Scare and the Depression in the 1920s and 30s. We went through Vietnam in the terrible period of the 60s I just described, and I am convinced if people will go vote and we restore facts, not alternative facts, but facts to the political dialogue of our country, we will regain our country and our future and we need to do it. So we're on a college campus and I wanna turn a little bit back to your campus life. You went to Yale, which I hear is a good school. But the Vietnam War, as you spoke about, happened while you were a student and the book ends of your college career were pretty profound in terms of American history as you've just described. And you joined the service and you fought in Vietnam and you speak of that in your book as in quite profound language. And I would echo Secretary Kerry's comments that this is a deep read and it is definitely well worth your time to pick it up and read it. Kind of embarrassing when the moderator has to echo the author who's talked about his own book. But I wanna talk about a passage that you wrote about your friend, Dick Pershing, who was killed in Vietnam and you were deploying to Vietnam at the time you received it, the telegram. And you said, you write that you were desperately sad and then you wrote that Persha's death increased your skepticism about the war. Right or wrong, it made more immediate and sensitive the growing doubts about the truth of what we were being told. It was a blow to whatever idealism about the war remained in me. Suddenly there was a personal cost. None of us in our little world had paid thus far. And I guess that's a question about participation in the political system and the question of opposition and dissent. Did it take a personal cost to you to really challenge your convictions and your idealism? And does it take that for Americans to really get mobilized and motivated, whether it's against war or against any political injustice? Does it take a personal cost? Would we have fewer wars if the costs were more evenly distributed? Would we have more activism if the distribution of inequity and injustice were more distributed across American society than in just certain areas? Well, the last two parts of the question are very, very key. And there's a different answer to those two questions than to the first question about does it take that personal cost to do it? No, I mean, no, it doesn't take the personal cost. And as I write, the personal cost raised questions. It jolted me. But it wasn't the reason for me making the decisions that I made. When I got to Vietnam, within hours, I began to have input that just reeked of our lack of capacity to make this work. I mean, when I get into my base, the base camp for the swiftboats where we were, and I see Vietnamese being trucked in and I write about it sort of staring out of this slatted rear of a truck and coming in to do all the work, all the menial work and kind of being bossed around and I thought somewhat exploited, if not abused. I just, you know, for a human point of view, I said, this is not great, this is not gonna work. When I began to see the definitions of free fire zones, which included women and children and people who obviously weren't enemy, at least not in any potency or any way that threatened us, and so more, I thought I'd describe it all. I mean, there were just so many things in the added, in the addition. But so those were the things that really galvanized me more. It was the policy, it was the lack of leadership, the lack of a strategy, the absurdity of these 50 foot aluminum boats driving up a river that was sometimes only just wide enough for the boat to be able to turn in. I mean, literally, with its nose muzzled in the mud with a mangrove and we'd spin around and get out, almost always ambushed, rarely shot first. You know, you sort of say, what are we doing? What is it, who was thinking about this? And I remember going back, I went back as secretary, I write about it. I went back and I met a guy 72 years old who tried to kill me. He was part of the team that was there to kill the swift boats. And he described it. He said, you know, we could hear you guys coming from three miles away. That's what we would say to our commanders. Guys, we got twin diesel engines, 1,000 horsepower. You can hear it forever. I mean, you know, they dig in the holes, they fire at us, they get down, and we fire away, we're not firing at anything. I mean, you don't want to get me started, do you? I'm just telling you folks that I came away with a sense of, you know, I very much like, you know, sorry I didn't catch 22. I mean, you kind of feel you're locked in that catch 22. It wasn't until years later, by the way, that I really learned how early the lying began. I didn't know it. Until I read Neil Sheehan's Bright Shining Lie, which I think is the best book written on sort of the course of the war. There are other great books in the war, the things they carry with them. Tim O'Brien and other people's books are really wonderful. But that's what crystallized it. Now, coming back to your question of loss and the, you know, I think that it galvanized, it wasn't the rational, and in the case of Dick, who was an extraordinary athlete, and one of those guys who just sort of cruised through college, it was particularly harsh on all of us who were as closest to or among as closest friends. I think, though, it would have been an error and inappropriate to just personalize it that way and therefore turn against it. Had to be larger reasons for dealing with the question of a war that your nation was in, where your leaders are telling you, this is critical in terms of our battle against communism and we have to fight, you know, it's the domino theory, we can't allow successive loss of these countries and somehow people sort of swallowed all of that. I think it raised, it indelibly imprinted in me something that I also write about later in the book because as a senator, it kept me going after the Reagan administration on the Contras. I mean, I'm the guy who blew the whistle on the Contra problem in Oliver North and what he was doing. And I went after Noriega and the drugs that we were discovering, the money that we found in the bank called BCCI, which we then got shut down. Ironically, my five-year classmate from high school, Bob Muller, was the head of the criminal division of the Justice Department and I turned over to him the materials after having had no success getting other people to do it and Bob Muller appointed 37 different prosecutors and they went out and got the job done and shut the bank down. So, you know, that I think is, you know, we need, it's what I was saying earlier folks, the rules haven't changed, the institution hasn't per se changed, it's the people who have changed. And so we have to change the people. I mean, we have to have people in there who will persist and, I mean, what makes me angrier than anything else right now in terms of what is going on and there's a lot to be upset about in our country right now. I mean, you know, but there isn't any problem we face today that we can't solve if we want to, if we put our minds to it and find that ingredient that John McCain and I found, an old chapter of John McCain and my journey to try to resolve the problem of Vietnam. And that's a whole different story. I won't go off on it yet, but I'd just say to you that we work bipartisanly. We came from different places. John was a prisoner for five and a half years. I was first a combatant in the South, a very different war from his and then I was a protester. But John McCain and I wound up together standing in his cell in Hanoi where we found the common ground of not only making peace with Vietnam but we found the common ground of trying to make peace here at home with ourselves because we were still at war with each other over Vietnam in 1990. So we did that and it's one of the things I'm proudest of in terms of my time in the Senate but that's what we have to restore today. We have to get back to this feeling that we have to get, I mean, the people like the Ted Cruz's who think it's my way or the Hawaii highway, boy, I hope Beto Rourke can put him on the highway. You know, because that's no way that is not what our forefathers and the founding fathers foresaw. And any of you have seen the marvelous Hamilton. I mean, that's what's all about folks. You get in the room where it happens and you have a compromise and the compromise can wind up deciding where the nation's capital is and deciding what your federal monetary system is. It's the nature of compromise of making a deal but we don't have people who wanna do that right now. They wanna just stop everything. They wanna break it apart. They're there to throw bombs and that's not how democracy can survive. So I feel very strongly about this and it burns me up that some of my former colleagues who I thought better of, frankly, regarding this but they are now all knowledgeable. There is no secret in Washington that people didn't know that hasn't appeared in the Woodward Book or in the Wolf Book. Everybody knows what's going on. Everybody knows how ill-equipped this administration is. Everybody knows what a desperate day every day is where you never know where it's going or where it's gonna come back to. That is no way to run the presidency in the United States. It's no way to be the leader of the free world and the fact is that sadly, members of the United States Senate have proven that they care more about power, about party and president than they care about that oath they took to uphold the Constitution of the United States and our institutions. Period. So this gets to a question about Russia and Russian interference. That gets to a question about Russia. I got a fear. So, you know, I served in the State Department at the end of the Cold War in the Office of Soviet and East European Analysis and one of the things that struck me was how profound the collapse of the Soviet Union was and not just the empire but just the state itself collapsed and I think back about all of the, you know, all of the kind of experts in the Soviet Union, all of the folks working at it from the American side but also thinking about it from the Soviet perspective and Vladimir Putin was a relatively senior KGB official at the time. He saw a state collapse. There's a profound component to that. The largest, one of the strongest military states in the history of the world just ended and it ended because of a fundamental crisis of legitimacy, the fact that the state itself couldn't adjudicate basic, kind of respond to and adjudicate basic contestation. And so as I think about the Russian influence in the elections, I wonder if Putin isn't kind of taking a lesson from his own experiences and understanding the collapse of the Soviet state and trying to create a moment in which the United States is simply unable to talk to one another, folks in the United States and whether or not that's part of his playbook but also is this a moment in which the democratic institutions of the country are at risk? And can the state collapse? Well, okay, let me try to dissect that question if I can, John, because I don't accept the premise that Putin can individually bring our nation down in terms of his interventions. His interventions are insidious. They have some impact. They're wrong. And we have to push back and fight back against it very forcefully, but far more serious in terms of the diminution of America's democracy right now and the problem we have is the attitude of the people who have come to Congress. I saw this begin, folks, in 1994 with the Gingrich Revolution. That's really when it began. Actually it began before that. It began with a Southern strategy with Richard Nixon to some degree and it began with the exploitation by a guy named Dick Vigory of direct mail which was extremely negative back in that period of time. That was the first wave of kind of under the radar screen attacks. Now they're obviously overt and out in public and I was the first, my year was the first example of really fake news attack on a major public stage where they, Trump, that's the wrong phrase. They put together the swift boat attacks and totally distorted my record and just lied and lied and lied again and I write in the book. I lay out very clearly each lie but despite our demasking the lie and showing them on the front pages of the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, you know, Los Angeles Times, every newspaper in America covered the facts but they continued to just advertise and put it out on TV and if you don't answer it for whatever the group is that happens to see that that's meaningful. That's where alternative facts come in. What's happened in America is we've got this self-selective process now by which people go to news they trust. They go to news where they wanna hear. So you go to MSNBC, you go to NBC, you go wherever you go or you go to Fox or you go to Breibart, whatever it is and you get the news that reinforces your position. You don't necessarily get facts and you don't have a breadth that a democracy requires to begin to be able to make the kinds of decisions necessary to build consensus around issues. Democracy requires the building of consensus but if you're constantly dividing people and preventing them from knowing what the baseline of facts are that's how you put the democracy at risk. So I see far more risk to our democracy coming from ourselves, coming from the indifference, coming from the unwillingness of major platforms to get together, decide how they're gonna actually prove what the facts are and get people to make decisions on those facts and that's a bigger challenge right now because if you can't build consensus how do you make a decision? How do you decide to do the things you need to do? And we're not doing them today in America, my friends. That's what motivates me, that's what bothers me so much. I mean, I could give you graphic examples. China is spending a trillion dollars a year to have a one belt, one road initiative that reaches out to about 70 countries building a new silk road from China all the way to the Atlantic, to the East and they're spending $500 billion on new technology labs and research labs for each of the countries touched on by the one belt, one road. They've built 49 different railroad routes from China to Europe. You can now send cargo on a railroad from China to Finland and it's cheaper than going by air or by sea. We're not doing anything. I'm sorry to tell you, the last infrastructure project that you could identify in America that was a national project was the big dig and you know, it's really sad. I rode on a train in Beijing that goes 300 miles an hour and I'm holding this glass at 300 miles an hour. That's about what the glass water looked like. Going to Tianjin, 300 miles an hour. Now we have the regional Amtrak. We got the Assela. The Assela can go 155 miles an hour. From Washington to New York, you know how much, how many miles it goes, 150, more than 150? 18 miles. It can't go fast under the Baltimore Tunnel because the vibrations might cave the tunnel in. It can't go fast over those little rickety bridges of the Chesapeake because it'll wind up in the Chesapeake. I have to tell you, I get, we look at our cities, mired in traffic jams. You can't move anywhere anymore, anywhere in America, frankly in parts of the world, but they're building mass transit. We're not. We need to get serious about rebuilding America. That's how you make America strong. And by the way, it's not just a question of making America great again. I think America is a great country. I think we've always been a great country. I think you need to make America fair again and sensible again and invest in the future for next generations. We're not doing it on energy. You've got, we don't even have a national grid in America. Do you know that? We don't have a grid. We have an east coast grid, you get your energy. We have a west coast grid. We have a little line that goes across from Chicago to the Dakotas. You have a line there. Then you have a big hole in the middle of the country. You can't send renewable portfolio energy from Iowa or Minnesota or somewhere to another part of the country. And of course, Texas has its own grid. Right, go figure it. So that's how it works. And the sad thing is the solution to climate change is energy policy. It's staring us in the face. We don't have to wait 10 years, five years to solve climate change. We just have to make the decision to get people off a coal, to move people away from fossil fuels and to start doing the things necessary to get the private sector to be willing to put more money into the R and D that's gonna give us the battery storage, that's gonna give us the gigawatts we need to be able to produce electricity to this country. And we can do it today. We already can do it. Last year, now, I negotiated the Paris agreements and I'm particularly versed in this after 30 plus years of working on it. When I was Lieutenant Governor here in this state, Mike Dukakis let me be a chair of a National Governors Conference of a committee. So I worked with John Sununu in New Hampshire and Dick Celeste in Ohio and we took an idea from the American Enterprise Institute which was a market-based idea to try to deal with acid rain. And guess what? We adopted it. And it became the Clean Air Act amendment on acid rain and we don't hear about acid rain anymore anymore because we did it. We could do the same thing for climate change because it's the largest market the world has ever seen. It's a four to five billion user market today. It's gonna go up to nine billion users in the next 30 years. There are already multi-trillions of dollars of value in that market and we have the technologies to be able to do what we need to do. It's people who aren't making the choice. So I keep coming back. How are you gonna get there? How do you get to making the choice? Only one way, activism. People have to be active in our democracy and make sure we are electing people who will get the job done. And what's happened in the last year is the reason people are so angry. Everybody's angry. Right, center, left, liberal, conservative. And I understand the anger. I'm angry. I share it because it's not working. There's nothing happening in the United States Senate today. I hate to say that after 28 years. Not happening. All gamesmanship on a daily basis, Kavanaugh, whatever the hell it is, they're not getting the job done for people because they can't. And what you had was the Gingrich Revolution and then the Gingrich Revolution didn't make it. What they promised. Gonna get rid of Roe v. Wade. Gonna have no regulations. We're gonna have lesser regulations. Smaller government, lower your taxes. You know all the promises. None of them were delivered. So people got angry. You had the Tea Party. Tea Party made the same promises. Nothing happened. You had the Freedom Caucus. Freedom Caucus made the same promises. Gridlock in Washington. Swamp, nothing happens. So Donald Trump comes along and you have a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. That's what happened. And now he's working overtime trying to appeal to his base. Always to, even his speech at the U.N. today, appeal to his base. The problem is you can't solve Americans' problems just dealing with your base. You gotta unite the country. You gotta pull people together around real choices that make a difference that will raise the quality of life, raise people's salaries, make it possible for people not to work two or three jobs to make ends meet, make education affordable, have healthcare that can't be taken away. These are things that have to happen. And they can happen. But I don't see any, I mean I don't see a major debate in Washington on this stuff. That's why I personally believe, you asked me why I'm optimistic, because I believe people are energized. And I believe that there is the possibility of a major course correction in 40 whatever days when we have the midterm elections. And if we do the right thing, we will have the ability to set this country back on course starting with that ending in 2020. And by the way, you don't pull out of Paris, you can pull out of Paris, but you're not formally out of Paris to one day after the next election. That's motivation, folks. So I think we have some time for some questions and answers. So I don't know if I see Mike set up, though. Let me figure out, do you have the mics? The mics are coming out. So while we're waiting for that, I do have one question, one final question, which is probably a short one. But who do you see emerging in the Democratic Party in 2020 as the likely next president? I have been crystal clear on this and I'm not faking it, it's not a ploy. I don't wanna talk, anybody should be talking about 2020. I've said it again and again. All the focus of energy needs to be on electing a House and Senate that will change the direction. We have the greatest course available to us. Let's go do it. So if you have questions, you can line up here and we'll take a few. Maybe we can take, I'm sorry. And there's another one that's coming. So maybe we'll take three questions to start. And so why don't you say your name and speak directly into the mic please so everybody can hear you. Okay, let's roll, because I wanna try and answer as many as I can. Hi, my name is Molly Kleinman. I'm a sophomore here at Mount Holyoke. I know you spoke a lot about why you're optimistic, but as someone who's 19, as someone who's never really lived through periods in the US of this much chaos, I find it really hard to say motivated. What encourages you to stay motivated through all of that? Well, I hope that I've spoke to that earlier, but I wanna say to you, look, every movement in this nation that has made a difference in my lifetime, and there've been quite a few. The peace movement, the environment movement, the women's movement, I mean, those are just stars. You can, you know, the civil rights movement. I mean, and I was able to take part in pieces of each of that. You know who made it work? The people who really did the work and the people who inspired. There were a few leaders around, Allard Lowenstein and Bobby Kennedy and President, but it was young people. We used to call them the peanut butter and jelly brigade, and they went up to New Hampshire, and it was those young people knocking on doors and who were part of campaigns who allowed Gene McCarthy to send a message to Lyndon Johnson, you can't run for president. That's what happened. It's hard work, guys. Maybe, maybe, I don't know, I keep talking with a lot of folks to try to figure out if there's a different way of looking at these things, but as I said earlier, there are not a lot of alternatives. If you want the world to be the world you want it to be, there's nothing better than deciding to go out and make it that. And that's how it works. You really can make a difference. And I've seen Lekwalensa jumped over a fence. He was a union guy. There was a strike. He jumped over the fence and joined the strike, and he became the president of his country. Vakilaf Havel was a poet. He was in jail for years. He came out because of what he believed. I mean, you think you want to be depressed and have a feeling there's no future? Be in jail alone for a long period of time. But he came out and ready to go back and fight. So I urge you, think about Gandhi. Think about people who have put their lives on the line to make a difference. One of the things that struck me as Secretary of State and as a senator, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, I marvel at the courage of people who are in prison because of the things they believe in a country where you don't even know they're there. None of us in this room know their names. None of us in this room know what they're going through today or tomorrow, what happened to them, but they're going through hell right now because they believe in the kind of opportunity that we have in the United States of America. And that's where America is at its best, inspiring people to do that. And you, as a young person, boy, you're our future. You've got to believe in the possibility of that change. I mean, go back to the beginning of our country. Those soldiers down at Valley Forge, when it looked bleak as hell. And, you know, Payne wrote about summertime soldiers and sunshine patriots. And what we wound up with was winter soldiers, people who hung in in the winter of Valley Forge. And, you know, we almost lost, guys. George Washington was in a frenzy. We were losing. People were deserting. We're here because a bunch of folks were willing to hang at the end of a British rope and thought they might, but they hung in there. And I leave you with just one message. Go back, I urge you to read the history of the, so the evolution of the Constitution in 1779. When Dr. Benjamin Franklin, after months of work in the Philadelphia Constitution Hall, came out of the hall, he was walking down the stairs late at night when they'd finished their work. And a woman shouted at him and said, tell us, Dr. Franklin, what do we have? A monarchy or a republic? And he looked at her and he said, a republic, if you can keep it. That's our mission today. And frankly, it's your mission. You gotta do that. If you don't, if that four minute soliloquy didn't persuade you, then I invite you to read my book. Because it's filled with examples of how you can make that kind of a difference. And it talks about that period of darkness in the late 1960s and how we got out of it. So we have quite a few people standing in line. So I wonder if we can take three or four questions simultaneously, if we can keep them very brief. We'll take the questions and the secretary here will answer them after, let's do four here and then four on this side. Do you have that piece of paper I can just jot? Speed round. I might have, oh I did, it's good. Okay, hi, I'm Emilia Malpass and I was wondering if you could tell your favorite anecdote from working with President Obama. Favorite anecdote working with President Obama. Hi, I'm Casey Repke, I'm a sophomore here and I know that you had mentioned that activism is the most important thing that we can do to get involved in politics. But there are a lot of different ways to be an activist, like protesting and social media and voting. And I was wondering what you think the most effective mode of activism is. Hi, I'm Ariane, thank you so much for coming out to see us today. I was wondering when there are strategic priorities in countries with hostile or authoritarian leaders such as North Korea or Iran, how do you determine whether it's appropriate to pursue negotiations even if it means making compromises that may strengthen their leadership or undermine our own interests? How do you determine if it's appropriate to negotiate even if it means making a compromise that may either strengthen their leadership or undermine our own interests? Speed round, this is a question about politics and the environment and limits on growth. I mean you're clearly familiar with Earth's limited capacity and it's fairly self-evident that it can't support the exponential growth of anything material. Basically the idea of the end of growth and peak energy can be a useful lens to look at much of current chaos, if you will. So the question is, well, it's very hard for any politician to gain support if they truthfully say the future can't be materially wealthier than the past. But how do we deal with the reality of the sort of the needed and the imposed limitations of growth? All right, that's four good questions. He's writing another book. Anecdote, Obama. Oval Office, he turns to me and he says, John, you've got the best hair in American politics. If you've always wondered what went on in the Oval Office, now you know. That's a true story. There's no one single best kind of activism. Activism is the conglomeration. It's the accrued effort of many different pieces. You have somebody who's on the radio and they have a daily show and they're banging away on the facts. You have a documentary filmmaker who makes a great film about injustice and what's happening. You're gonna affect a lot of people. You have somebody who is gonna write the new treaties on freedom or on activism. I mean, there's just so many different ways to affect, but they all require something that tries to have an impact on people's thinking and people's choices. So you can do that in lots of ways. Now, I happen to believe there is a moment in all of our social structure, life, where people are required to give into the democratic system. That means doing something that affects public choices, that affects particularly campaigns. So if you wanna know the most effective thing when you're two months from an election, is to be involved in that election, folks. It's very simple. And we have this incredible opportunity to mobilize all the anger you have or frustration you have or cynicism you may have, pessimism, this is the moment. And please heed what I said to you. Elections matter, 54.2%, 62.3%. That's a lot of the difference. And I just can't put it more bluntly. You can choose to do all kinds of things in the intervening months and days, but there comes a time when in a democracy, it comes down to casting your vote, particularly on an issue that has been made a voting issue. And I think there are just plenty of those right now. On the question of how do you determine in terms of negotiation with leadership, there's a distinction between obviously negotiating and engaging. I am almost universally pro-engagement and not emptily, not for the sake of simply engaging without a roadmap and without a clear agenda of how are you gonna get where you're going? I think in the case of President Trump, for instance, on North Korea, we wanted to engage North Korea. We actually had back channel initiatives going on several different occasions. We made it very clear to Kim Jong-un. We were prepared to negotiate a non-aggression treaty. We were prepared to have an understanding on mutual defense. We were prepared to provide economic assistance. We were prepared to do any number of things, but providing, they were genuinely prepared to denuclearize. Now, we had a clear definition of what that meant, and it's because of the clarity of our definition and the requirements that we have some show of good faith before we met that we never had a meeting. And that's because they cheated in the 1990s in what was called the Framework Agreement, which Bill Clinton arrived at, and because they had cheated, we didn't have as much leeway to be able to go forward. Now, President Trump made a decision just go have a big Singapore bash. And a lot of flags, a lot of glitz, a lot of question marks, but it didn't come out with a communique that meant anything. And now they're trying to do a redux. They're gonna meet again, because they don't have a definition of what denuclearization is. And there is no methodology for how you are going to ascertain the arsenal of North Korea. Where is the arsenal? How big is the arsenal? Where and what are they willing to do to provide access to that arsenal so we can have verification? All of which, my friends, we got with Iran. So the president who pulled out of the Iran deal, saying it's the worst deal ever, has yet to prove he can get any kind of deal with North Korea at all, which begins to move you in that direction. And I hope he gets it, mind you. I'm not wishing failure here. We all need to hope this can work, and we'll all be advantaged to buy it. But I don't think the methodology yet is there, and I think he has a very different sense of what denuclearization means. To him, it means the United States gets its troops out of South Korea. It means that we don't have an umbrella necessarily for Japan or for Korea. And that's gonna be a very hard fought challenge here. If he truly is prepared to get rid of his arsenal, then we can make some progress. So you really have to measure, to answer the last part of your question, how do you decide when to negotiate how? You negotiate when you really believe you've got a basis for a negotiation. It took me two years as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, working with the Omanis and others to test the Iranians and get to a place where then I was secretary, the president was comfortable in authorizing an actual negotiation. Because we had reason to believe they were serious and that there wasn't gonna be an exploitative process and a farce. We also demanded that North Korea, a North Korea that Iran take very specific steps at the very initiation of our effort before we agreed to do anything at all. They had to destroy their centrifuges. They had to freeze where they were. They had to get rid of their stockpile of enriched uranium. They had to stop enriching above a certain level, above which you simply couldn't make a bomb. So we required extraordinary things. And I would just say to all of you, I'm not gonna go through all of the Iran deal, but I'll tell you bluntly, it is the single strongest, most accountable, most transparent, far-reaching nuclear agreement with any country on the planet today, which gave us the ability to know exactly what Iran was doing, which is why our defense department wanted to keep it. Our intel community and our energy department, which manages nuclear weapons, all of them signed off on this agreement as being something we would know. We weren't vouching that Iran might not try to break out one day, but we were able to vouch that if they did, we would know it. And every military option available to us in the future was available to us then. And one of the lessons I learned in Vietnam is, before you send young men and women, American young men and women off to fight a war, you've got to damn well exhaust all the remedies of diplomacy in order to make it clear to the Americans what you're doing. So that's how you do it. On the subject of environment limitations and exponential growth and material replenishment, et cetera, it's a really good question. And it's a vexing one because I talk about this a lot in various places I go having put so much time into climate. Folks, I just want to emphasize to all of you if I can take a moment on this question. It's existential. I mean, it's really existential. Bothers me so much to have a president of the United States without one scientific fact, without one basis of backup by any peer-reviewed study or analysis whatsoever, polls America out of something 196 nations came together to start in Paris. And it was a huge step to get there. I was in Copenhagen. I was in most of the conferences over 25, 30 years. I was in Rio, 1992 with Al Gore and Tim Worth and a group of us four years after Jim Hansen at the NASA had said climate change is happening. And George Herbert Walker Bush had signed on to a voluntary structure to deal with climate. It just didn't work because it was voluntary and it wasn't urgent enough. So here we are today in 2018. We're at about 1.5 degrees centigrade of increase in the warmth of the planet. Scientists tell us that two degrees centigrade is a tipping point. But no scientist in none of us, I can't tell you where that tipping point takes us. I don't know. I just know it's a tipping point. That things begin to unravel. Ecosystems. An ecosystem is a system. And nobody quite knows if one piece of it starts to go into extremists what happens to the rest of it. So there is a precautionary principle of governing. It's a principle that everybody ought to adopt. We buy insurance for a home. We buy insurance for a car. We buy insurance for life. We buy health insurance. We buy all these insurances. But we're not buying insurance for this planet. We're not buying insurance. And by the way, we're spending a hell of a lot more money than we would be if we were buying it right now. Last year, three storms. Irma, Harvey, and Maria. Those three storms cost $265 billion. You, you paid for that. It's one-third of the Defense Department budget. It's more money than we spend on the Commerce Department, the Education Department, four other departments put together. We dump more water in Houston in five days than goes over Niagara Falls in a year. Irma had the first sustained 185 miles an hour wind for 24 hours ever recorded. And Maria we know destroyed Puerto Rico. I mean, folks, this is serious stuff. I'm not trying to scare people because as I said, the energy choices we could make today make the difference. Now, I'm proud to tell you this. The 196 countries that went to Paris that we worked, the United States led that. I went to China and negotiated with President Xi. I got the agreement that we would work together for the first time ever. And China and the United States stood up together in Beijing, announced our reductions and emissions, and that led the rest of the world to Paris to get the job done. It really did. We changed the dynamic. But, but now we're pulling out, which takes away our leadership from the table. And the rest of the world stayed, but you know what they're doing now? Other leaders are backing off a little and saying, well, if the United States isn't gonna do this, well, maybe we shouldn't have to do it. And so it's undermining Paris. But here in America, governors, governors, mayors around the country in 38 states, we have renewable portfolio laws that are passed, including here. We're moving towards alternative renewable. Not fast enough, but moving. The theory of Paris was we were gonna excite the energy of the private sector to do a lot of investing, and in fact, it worked. We got $358 billion going into these things. It's not happening fast enough. So bottom line is we have mayors in those 38 states which equal 80% of the population of America. They're going after the same renewable portfolio alternative sustainable energy that we were before. They're not changing. So I can proudly tell you, Donald Trump may have pulled out of the Paris Agreement, but the American people overwhelmingly are still in the agreement. And we're gonna try and hold on to it. Now, here's a bigger problem, and we're not gonna solve it tonight. I'll just present you the challenge. Not one country in the world is living sustainably, not one. So when the question is asked about resources and where we're heading, we have a huge challenge ahead of us. What makes me optimistic and believing we can meet the challenge, ultimately, is if we have the leadership that puts the choices on the table, folks, I believe technology and science can help fill the gaps with respect. I don't think we're gonna use every ounce of oil and gas. We're gonna get off it. The question is we're gonna get off it fast enough. Last year in the United States of America, 75% of the new electricity that came online in our country was solar. Did you know that? 75%. You know how much coal was after all Donald Trump's been saying about coal? 0.2%. That's what makes, I think the marketplace can move in that direction, and there'll be new fabrication materials. It won't necessarily be wood. It'll be something else. We don't have to cut down a tree. We can have sustainable forests. We can begin to build things with new materials. We will find ways to deal because I think we have that ingenuity, and we have to bet on that, folks. We really do have to bet on that because otherwise it really does get to be bleak, but I think we can manage. We can have much better food production. If women were brought in to have access to the same seeds, the same technology, the same machinery that men have in farming around the world, we'd reduce 100 to 150 million people who are hungry in the world today. There are things we could do that will advance life, and look at us. We're living longer than human beings have ever lived. We're living healthier. We're living better even though people are working harder in America and we're not doing as well. Rit large, there's far less violence today claiming the lives of people anywhere in the world despite our abhorrence of someone having their head cut off in the desert in a jumpsuit, or despite bombs going off in one place or another. The fact is the last century, 30 million people in Russia alone in World War II, six million Jews, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, think about it, because we're not seeing the same kind of state on state violence with the exception of Putin and Ukraine by and large. We saw Rohingya and the Burmese disgraceful, but one or two instances are so different from the last century. Our challenge right now is non-state actors, and that's where I think our engagement, John, is so critical, and I'll end on this, but it's relevant to what we're talking about. There are two billion young people between the ages of 15 and 24 in the world. That's a mischief age, I mean it really is, particularly for young men in North Africa, South Central Asia, and the Middle East. And a foreign minister friend of mine said to me, you know what happens is the extremists grab these kids at age 12 or 13, and they proselytize to them, they pay them a stipend, and six months later, they don't need to pay them anymore, they're sold, and they go out and recruit. And the phrase that just chilled me, that he left me with, this foreign minister, he's still active publicly, he said to me, John, these guys have a 35-year plan, and we don't even have a five-year plan. See, that's what I think we bring to the table. The United States of America is the ability to bring five-year plans to the UN and to the world. We galvanized action on refugees. We weren't able to solve Syria, but guess what? We gave more money and did more for refugees than any other nation on the planet. We brought other countries together at the UN to do it. So I believe if we have the right leadership, we can manage this question of materials and of the rate at which we are using up the resources of the planet, and I'm convinced of our ability to make life sustainable if we will begin to make the right kinds of choices. And people are doing it individually in communities all around the world. So I think it's really doable. Thank you. So I am very mindful of time, and I see long lines, and I'm sorry we're not gonna be able to get to everybody this evening, I really apologize. But if we can... I'm out of here, because I'll stay a little longer, I don't mind. We can stay? Unless you all are falling asleep or you got, you know. Well, let's take four questions over on this side. You don't have the Patriots to go home to, so. So if you could keep your question very quick and concise, thank you. So, hi, my name is Leah Keefe. Thank you both for coming out tonight, and okay. Hi, my name is Leah Keefe. I'm really thankful for both of you coming out tonight. I was curious about how to get people who are my age and who are of voting age to get out and vote. How do you get them to do that? Because the numbers are quite startling, and I'm worried about the Supreme Court too. Hi, I'm Bill Quillian. I'm a professor of English emeritus. I heard you speak very briefly with Chris Matthews about national service. National service is something I've been interested in for a long time. I think we ought to have some options for kids graduating from high school who are not quite ready for the wonderful offerings at Mount Holyochazz and other, so I'd just like to hear you say a word or two about national service. Thank you so much for your service, by the way. Thank you so much for coming out. I was wondering, so during, while you were Secretary of State, you worked really hard to create peaceful negotiations between Israel and Palestine. You talked about how difficult that was, Ben Rhodes discussed in his book, and in public about how difficult that was, and so did Obama, and that was during a time when the U.S. had relative leverage in the region. And with Trump's new policies, specifically moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, and then cutting aid to Palestinians, I wonder what Democrats, specifically contenders for 2020, should be thinking about when it comes to Israel and Palestine and just the future of a peace deal in your mind. Thank you, my name is Madeline Fitzgerald and I'm a sophomore here. So I know you spoke to Ronan Farrow for his book, The War on Peace, and he spoke about the decline of American diplomacy, and he spoke about how during the Obama administration there was like a proliferation of celebrity generals, and the State Department has essentially declined in like glamour and prestige and sort of like general like focus and importance. And given that you were the Secretary of State during the Obama administration, I'm wondering if you could share sort of your thoughts about the future of the State Department and sort of, yeah, the future of the State Department and the future of diplomacy in this country. Thank you. So I wonder if we can maybe answer these questions and then Secretary Kerry has generously agreed to sign some books at the end of the event this evening. And maybe for those of you who still have questions, we can do some questions and let the rest of the audience depart this evening, but we would line up afterwards with those of you who have blue tickets, can line up first, we'll start over here, and Secretary Kerry will sign books. And those of you who have yellow tickets will line up kind of on the back side after those with blue tickets apparently, so. So let me try, I'll be very quick here. The young woman who asked about getting the vote out, I think I've said some things about it, but look, that's where leadership is important. I mean, I really believe leaders have to motivate people sufficiently that you believe there's a reason to go out and vote. And if they're not credible and they're not providing an answer to a legitimate impulse or need that you have, it's not gonna happen. My hope is that enough young folks are now getting engaged that they're gonna drag their roommates and their friends and their classmates and others along with them. And that's our best hope. We need young people to vote. We desperately need young people to vote. And I would think, particularly on college campuses, there ought to be a real understanding of the stakes. I mean, I can understand in some places people may not have as much of a feeling of a stake in the community around them. But boy, if you're on a campus like this or anywhere else in America, getting a great education, there's zero excuse for not being out, campaign. With respect to national service, I'm delighted to say something about it. I have always believed that everybody in our nation ought to give something back. And I believe there ought to be a form of national service. I am not somebody who believes everybody has to go into the military, obviously. And you don't have to be a conscientious objector not to go in. You should just have a choice. But there's something for everybody to do. There's no question in my mind. And we should be organizing ourselves in a way that makes that possible. So many other countries have mandatory service. I mean, in Israel, everybody serves. In other countries, everybody serves. And I think that taking a year out of your life, I mean, I write about this in the book. I was a perfect candidate for a gap year because I was not extraordinarily motivated even though I was privileged to be a great university. I did a lot of extracurricular activities. I played sports and debated and was engaged in politics and everything else. But I think that it really wasn't until law school that I began to learn how to think. So I think it's good for people to go out. I also think you learned leadership skills. I learned real leadership skills in the military. When you have men, back then was men, now women too, who are in your command and there are life and death decisions and you're responsible for young folks, younger than you, you learn a lot. And it was a graduate school of its own kind. And I learned hierarchy and management and leadership and responsibility and all these kinds of things. So I urge young people everywhere I go to think about go into the military, go in. The other thing that bothers me or any other service, and here's the other things I think we could do. We could have kids going in and helping in schools. We could have young people going in. We could put a year into education. We could put a year into working as a nurse's aide or hospital assistant or assisted living. I mean, there's just so many things. You could work on the environment in your community. You could work on recycling. You could help your community implement a full measured program. You could do, there's so much to be done. There is no rationale for not being able to harness the energy of young people who would then get a sense of contribution to community and of how you legitimately build the strength of our great country. In fact, to Tuckville in the 1800s when he was an American wrote his wonderful observations, said that Americans were unique because we alone among most anybody he'd seen do charity. We give to other people. We take care of people in our own community. There's a sense of responsibility. And that's a big deal that I think National Service could help. The final reason I think it's important is the voluntary service, the volunteer army has worked. But it's not a cross section of America. And I personally feel after Vietnam, particularly, one of the reasons Vietnam went on as long as it did was because the sons and daughters of a lot of powerful people in America didn't have to serve. And that's wrong. I think everybody bears that responsibility. And so I am for some form of service. Now you gotta work out the cost issues and et cetera, but I think it's doable. If we're gonna pay people, if we've got these student loans, there are all kinds of ways to work on student loans as part of the reduction for the service. So there are all kinds of things we could do that would make the country stronger and also reduce the burden of debt that people have. On Palestine, Israel, look, I am a huge Israel supporter, have been all my life 28 years in the Senate. I had 100% voting record. I believe in the dream of Israel as a democracy in the region, land of milk or honey, and I want it to succeed. My fear is that the current course Israel is on, regrettably, is not providing the basis by which the Palestinians are able to build capacity and be able to find a peace. Now, I wanna be fair here. President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority missed its own opportunities several times to try to make peace and Israeli leaders, Barak, Ehud Barak, Rabin, Shimon Peres, others, all tried to move the process down the road. The current government in Israel has a majority of cabinet members who have publicly stated there will never be a Palestinian state. So right now, things are kind of deadlocked and frozen and one of the great lessons of diplomacy is you need ripeness as part of a negotiation. It's not just a decision you make about whether you wanna do something, you may wanna do it, but you have neither party prepared to take the steps necessary to do it. And I think in the end, there's a great question looming for Israel, which is if the majority population between the Jordan River Valley and the Mediterranean is non-Jewish as it is today, how can you be one state and be Jewish and a democracy at the same time? No one has been able to answer that question and I think that question is the principal challenge of where how you go forward. But Israel is gonna have to make its own decision. We're not gonna decide it for them or should we, we can't decide it for them. We can't decide it for a government that says there won't be a Palestinian state. And so something has to begin to emerge in the democracy that is there in Israel itself and that's something we all have to hope for and pray for. The final question was Madeleine wanted to know about the, yes, the future of the State Department, Madeleine. I am confident, no matter what, we're gonna have a State Department that's gonna be a very important entity for our nation and happily we have extraordinary young men and women who still wanna take and do take the foreign service exam who wanna give their lives to being diplomats and being involved in the foreign service and we're very lucky to have those young people. There are unfortunately many people who resigned over the course of the last year and a half, two years, a combination of factors, but they chose to do that and we'll go into all of the factors. But I think that it depends a lot on what happens in the next two years. If America has a course correction in this election and then we elect a president in 2020, I think it will take a matter of months to turn around the relationship with most countries in the world where they are ruptured and difficult like some of our best friends, Canada, NATO, Europe. It'll take longer to replenish the State Department and there'll be a gap in experience in the professional cadre of people coming up that you rely on, the next generation of leaders. But we'll get there, we will get there. And I suspect that if the next president does the right things, we can bring back a great number of the people who saw fit to leave and replenish it fairly rapidly. So I'm a believer in the State Department, there are 700,000 people total around the world that's including, that's not all Americans, that's including people we hire in other countries who are indigenous citizens to help us in that country, they're critical to the work of the State Department. And the work we do every day around the world is critical to making our country safer in one way or another. I'm a huge fan and advocate and I admire the sacrifices that people in the State Department make. I write in my book about a young woman, Anne Smedinghoff, who escorted, she was what we call my control officer, she was one of the chief people who was responsible for building my trip when I went to Afghanistan. And she was brilliant and effervescent, motivated, creative, capable. And she introduced me to 10 women in Afghanistan who had started businesses. And they were multi-million dollar businesses now, unheard of in a country that had no women doing almost anything. When we went into Afghanistan in 2001, there were about a million kids in school and they were all boys. Now there are seven million, eight million kids in school and about 45% of them girls. It's an incredible story of empowerment of women in a country. And obviously we've got to sort through how we're gonna disengage from Afghanistan, it's very expensive, there are a lot of reasons. But bottom line is that's the work of the State Department. I'm sad to say that three weeks after I left, Anne Spenninghoff was killed by a suicide bomber. And she was delivering books to a school. Those are the kind of people we have in the State Department folks. And we should all be very proud that we get that kind of citizen to go to work for us. I wanna thank all of you for coming out tonight on a rainy night. And I wanna thank Secretary Kerry again for this conversation this evening. Thank you.