 I'm Michael Barr. I'm the Joan and Sanford Wildein of Public Policy here at the Ford School. A welcome to all of you who are watching online. I know we have a number of people next door in the beddy watching, across the hallway in our other classrooms. And many people around the country and around the world are actually tuned in right now. So welcome to all of you here to sunny but very cold Ann Arbor. It is just an absolute delight to be able to welcome you for this conversation with Ambassador Susan Rice, whom I'm going to say a little bit more about in just a moment. First, I'd like to acknowledge just our wonderful university leadership. We have our president, Mark Schlissel, here in the room with us. I want to thank him for his leadership of this great institution. We have Regent Kathy White here. I want to thank her for her leadership as well. We also have a number of great university leaders from around the school that I'm not going to call all of them out, but just thank you for being here. I really appreciate your presence and your support. This is an event that is part of our Wiser Diplomacy Center Speaker Series, which has featured many distinguished diplomats and policymakers. I want to thank U of M Regent Ron Wiser and his wife Eileen Wiser for their generosity and their vision. Unfortunately, they couldn't be here right now for this event, but they'll have a chance to be with Susan later today. And I just wanted to have us all pause and thank them for their support for our program. I have the great honor of now introducing our featured speaker. Ambassador Susan Rice is one of the nation's foremost experts in national security and international affairs. She served on the National Security Council staff and as an Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Clinton administration. She served as US Ambassador to the United Nations and National Security Advisor under President Barack Obama. She is the author of the recently released book, Tough Love, My Story of Things Worth Fighting For, that we're going to be talking with her this afternoon about. Copies of Tough Love are available for free here today for all of you who are in the audience and watching in the adjacent classrooms. And we're very grateful for Ambassador Rice's generosity and making that possible. Please be sure to pick up a copy of what is really a terrific, engaging, and inspiring book. Today is, of course, a celebration of the legacy and impact of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In her book, Susan mentioned several times the well-known quote of Dr. King, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. President Obama, in fact, had that quote woven into the carpet in the Oval Office. Dr. King first spoke these words in March 1965 in Montgomery, Alabama. Later that same year, he repeated the phrase in a speech in New York. We encourage his listeners not to be discouraged in their fight for freedom and equality. He said, and I quote, if the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition that we now face will surely fail. Before victory is won for brotherhood and justice, some more will have to get scarred up a bit. But if this is the price that some must pay to free their children and their white brothers from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive. Yes, we shall overcome, and we shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. I think this message is one we ought to pause and reflect upon today as we honor his memory. Ambassador Rice's career of public service and commitment to international diplomacy exemplifies the spirit of action and compassion modeled by Dr. King. I found Dr. Rice's book inspiring. In it, you'll learn about her early life or impressive career, the time she spent in President Obama's cabinet. Perhaps most admirable, however, is her willingness to discuss the missteps she made along the way and how she strove to recognize and to correct them. No matter the stumbling box, Susan has remained steadfast in her commitment to making the world safer and promoting human rights through international cooperation. You will find her full biography in the program, so I won't tell you all the details, but let me just say, Ambassador Rice's 25-year career of public service is impressive. She has served at the highest levels of the United States government. She's developed expertise globally around the world. She's deeply versed in national security policy and economic development and cybersecurity. After finishing her doctorate in international relations at Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, Ambassador Rice held a series of staff positions at the National Security Council, and as I mentioned, later served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. In 2002, she joined the Brookings Institution as a senior fellow, and in 2008, she returned to public service, first as U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and later as National Security Advisor. Now, let me just say a word on format. I'm gonna talk with Susan for a while, and then we're gonna have some time for questions from the audience. Two Ford School students sitting right here, Amy Turner and Victor Rottang, with Professor John Hansen, will sift through your question cards and pose them to Ambassador Rice. For those who are watching online, please tweet your questions using the hashtag policy talks. I hope you'll join me once again in welcoming Ambassador Susan Rice. So. You got a good audience. Thank you all for coming out good afternoon. Good afternoon. I can't let you get away with that introduction. You wanna start? What do you wanna say? That's a garbage introduction. Well, what should we talk about? The most important thing you left out is that we have been friends and colleagues for 30 years. That is true. And. That's like, I know he's gonna get to that, right? We're gonna get to that in the Q and A. Yeah, all right. I just thought it was only fair that the audience know what the deal is. We met, many of you in the audience are in graduate school. And we met in graduate school. At Oxford. A couple days ago. At Oxford. Yeah, when we were both young. Impressionable. Yeah. Working on our master's degrees. Yeah, we were in the trenches together. And then we actually had our first quasi-policy jobs together. So we should explain that. I wouldn't have said quasi. Well, it was quasi because it was a campaign. We didn't know what we were doing, but it was a real policy job. So Michael and I were graduate students together at Oxford, master's students. I was one year ahead of him. But we were in the same cohort. And then we both worked on the painful and ill-fated Democratic presidential campaign of 1988. When the Democratic nominee was somebody most of you probably have never heard of, named Michael Dukakis. And that was my first of three campaigns and my most stark exposure to what a losing campaign feels like. What failure looks like. Yes. Yeah. So that's... It was humbling. To say the least. Yes. Part of that campaign, as I recall, involved Governor Dukakis riding around in a tank with a hat that made him look like Snoopy. Yes. But you didn't suggest that. I had nothing to do with that. And I'm here to say, nor did you. Nor did I. All right. I just thought it was important for you all not to be snowed by that. Introduction. A ridiculous introduction. It was, it was. And we have also in the crowd Lisa Cook who is also our friend and colleague. Also our friend and colleague from that era and today. So I want to start by talking about the title of your book, Tough Love. You can think of Tough Love. A lot of people say Tough Love is kind of a strategy. Like you deploy Tough Love because you want somebody to get better at the thing that they're doing in some way. And reading your book, I was struck by the fact that seemed to me that Tough Love was just a fact in the book. Like a lot of the love that you got was tough. A lot of the love that you gave was sometimes tough. You're very tough on yourself to the extent that you love yourself. You were very tough about yourself. So help us understand as an audience why you call the book Tough Love and what it means to you. Well, first of all, to me Tough Love means loving fiercely but not uncritically. It means that when you care deeply about somebody, you care enough to give them your unvarnished truth. And you do it from the vantage point of somebody who has their best interests at heart. And that's how my parents raised me and my younger brother, John. They were fierce defenders and supporters of ours, but always willing to tell us when we could do better and when we had fallen short. And it came from the perspective of parents who had our best interests at heart. That's how Ian and I have tried to raise our own kids. It's how I've led my teams in government, both inviting that kind of feedback when I needed it most but also being willing to give it to others. And frankly, also it's how I've tried to serve our country. I love this country passionately, but I believe we have and do and will make mistakes. And we need to be willing to acknowledge those and to learn from them. And so Tough Love, as I wrestled with the title of the book as I think so many authors do, when it hit me, it really encompassed so many aspects of my personal and professional life. And it seemed fitting. And maybe it is a fact of my experience, but it's a fact I'm deeply grateful for because I think too often we're shy about sharing what needs to be said and what we need to hear and what we need to convey. Worried about ruffling feathers or being hurt or offending. And yet that kind of loving where you care enough to share what's important, I think is a huge gift. That's great. One of the things that students often ask is how can you be successful at this or that job? And I say to them, among other things, some of you surprised, I said, love your team. And I was struck by that. I crashed dinner with Susan and Ian a few weeks ago. She was supposed to be having dinner with her former staff. Yeah, a group of them. And I just showed up. But I was- Well, actually, okay, I won't tell the whole story. You could tell the whole story, but it's not that interesting. We were supposed to have dinner the next night. Michael got confused. And he was sitting alone in the restaurant across town waiting for me to show up and sending me these frantic texts. You were uncharacteristically late. Worried that something had happened to me and then I realized what the mistake was. And so he came and joined the dinner that I was actually supposed to have that night. That is true. But the point of my story was that it was evident that you love your team. And that was really wonderful to be able to see. And it's an important part of being an effective leader is building that love with the people you work with. And it's a word that I think people are scared to use. Love. The tough part and the love part. Yeah, well, this is one of the things I learned as I describe in the book over the course of my career. I started in government very early at age 28. I was very fortunate to have a job on the National Security Council staff at the very beginning of the Clinton administration at the what they call the director level. The National Security Council staff is actually quite flat. Directors are the sort of day-to-day policy experts with discrete portfolios. My responsibility was the United Nations in peacekeeping. Small little topic. Yeah, but you can imagine like when I ran the Africa office, for example, we had a small staff of three or four directors at the peak and one would do Southern Africa, one would do East Africa, West Africa, et cetera. So these are the substantive policy experts. And it was in that context that I first had the opportunity to serve and had the opportunity to be part of a talented team early in my career. And I made some as I moved up, particularly in the course of my years in the Clinton administration, then after two years ran the Africa office at the NSC. And then at age 32 was named by President Clinton to be an assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Beating the record previously set by Richard Holbrook for youngest assistant secretary of state ever. Anyway, in the- He didn't like that. He didn't like that. Are we going to get to that? No. We'll get to that. Not doing that? I'll do that later. Later. Okay, later. But the point is I got these jobs early and I was, you know, I think substantively relatively well-prepared, but in terms of leading teams and managing people. And particularly when I got to the State Department at 32, I was an African-American woman who had just had a baby, a breastfeeding mother, and my colleagues and particularly those senior colleagues who were the ambassadors and deputy assistant secretaries and the like who worked with me, served under me, were 20 to 30 years my senior. And predominantly white male diplomats. And so figuring out in that context, how to lead and manage teams when frankly many of them thought I didn't deserve to be in the job I was in was a real challenge. And I made some mistakes and I talked about them in the book and where I tripped up and what I learned and how I was fortunate to have colleagues and friends who took me aside and gave me the kind of tough love that I needed to grow. But it was in that context that I learned that eventually that leading a team is not a solo sport. It's a team, leadership is a team sport. And that means that you have to inspire people to want to join together and join you in a common cause. And that to achieve that, they have to feel that they matter, that their voices are heard, that their inputs are valued and that as human beings they're valued. And so yes, you do need the glue of a team is mutual respect, but it's also caring and I wouldn't shy from using the term love. So how do you think, you just described the early arc of your career which was involved a rapid ascent in at the highest levels of government. And you think back to that stage, how do you think you had the courage to empower yourself to be effective in that context? How did you have the confidence? We're gonna talk about too much confidence later, but how did you have the confidence to even get started on that path? What do you think you drew on to be able to do that? Well, to an extremely large extent as I spent time talking about in the book, the core strength that I had, the confidence that I developed my ability to enter unfamiliar environments and to be prepared to do my best and hopefully excel really came from my parents and all that I was taught in my childhood and growing up and it came frankly from their experiences. And I don't know if you wanna go there now, but I think it kinda undergirds. Let's talk about your family because I do think it's an important part of who you are and the path that you took, the path that you chose. So I have two very different parents who came from different backgrounds. My mother's family, her parents were immigrants from Jamaica that came to Portland, Maine in 1912. And as you can imagine- Huge Jamaican community there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Maine is not the most diverse state today even though it is much more diverse than it used to be. Back then in 1912, you probably could count on a couple of hands, the number of families who were people of color. And my grandparents had no education. They were, my grandfather was a janitor. My grandmother was a maid and a seamstress. And like so many immigrants, they came to this country with the dream of being able to have a family and educate their children and enable their children to live much more professionally successful and gratifying lives. And they did. They scraped and they saved. They had five children and they sent all five of their kids to college. My mother was the youngest of five. She had four older brothers. They all went to Bowdoin College in Maine. My grandfather was the first man ever to actually have four sons attend Bowdoin College even though he himself, the closest he ever got to Bowdoin was bartending at events on the weekends there. But two of my uncles became doctors. In fact, they lived and worked many years in Detroit. That's where they practiced. One became a university president having been an English literature professor and then the fourth an optometrist and then along comes my mother who was 11 years younger than her youngest brother. And they didn't know where she should go to college because girls at that point couldn't go to Bowdoin College. She ended up as her high school valedictorian and president of her student body and a national champion debater attending Radcliffe College, which as you know is now. Not before your grandfather tried to get Bowdoin to change the rules. He did try but didn't succeed. It was not for many years after that that women were admitted to Bowdoin. So this is my mom graduated from high school in 1950. So this is the timeframe. And she went on to Radcliffe. Had a very successful academic career there. Was president of the student body. Again, a place where in her class of 1954 there were three women of color. And yet she excelled and went on to be instrumental in the establishment of the Pell Grant program. Her whole emphasis professionally was on access to higher education for low income and minority students because she barely was able to attend college herself. They, it's a longer story I tell in the book. My grandfather, having sent the older kids to college right before my mom was supposed to go he fell down an elevator shaft at the music store where he was a janitor and he broke his back and he broke his legs and he was in the hospital all this time for many months and all their savings was sapped. She almost didn't get to attend Radcliffe College because she was denied the scholarship that the state of Maine Radcliffe Committee was supposed to give her as valedictorian. She was denied it because she was black. And the rule was that the recipients of the scholarship were supposed to come back to Maine and move in the proper circles to raise money for Radcliffe. And because she was black by definition she couldn't move in the proper circles. So she was denied the scholarship and her high school principal and her debate coach appealed directly to Radcliffe and they gave her the money. And so having realized how important that financing was to her and to so many others that's why she devoted her career to trying to create opportunity through the Pell Grant program. When she passed in 2017 she was known as the mother of the Pell Grant. And that Pell Grant program has enabled 80 million Americans to attend college in this country. So of course it's under assault today. But it endures and I think we'll continue to grow. So my mom was this vanguard herself of an African-American woman in environments where she was not expected to be much less thrive or succeed. And she went on to be a corporate executive and to sit on 11 corporate boards. And so she was an incredibly powerful role model for me, a working mother at a time when many of my peers' mothers didn't work. And who wasn't afraid to be a pioneer. My dad came from a very different background. He was the descendant of slaves born in South Carolina in 1920 in the height of Jim Crow and Lynching and all of that. And yet his background was fascinating. He was third generation college educated. My great grandfather who had been a slave in South Carolina he fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. And then after the war an officer who had supervised him, a white officer from Massachusetts invited him up to Massachusetts to get a basic education to get primary education. He went back to South Carolina, began teaching school. This is during reconstruction. And then got driven out of South Carolina by the Ku Klux Klan and he fled to New Jersey and he got his college degree at a Divinity degree at Lincoln University just years after having been enslaved. And then he went on, my great grandfather went on to found a school in New Jersey called the Borden Town School. It was founded in the late 1880s and it endured until the mid 1950s. And it educated generations of African Americans in not only vocational and technical skills but also college preparatory skills. And so Albert Einstein and Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt, they all visited this campus. And it was a really important educational institution. So along comes my dad, two generations later. Again, the expectation was he was supposed to go into the ministry or something like that. He had no interest in that. He ended up getting his BA in New York City at City College of New York in economics and then got an MBA. But then he was drafted into World War II. And that turned out to be an incredibly formative experience for him. He served at Tuskegee with the Tuskegee Airmen. And rather than viewing that experience as some great opportunity to be part of proving that African Americans could fly and fight as well as anybody else, he really deeply resented the notion that African Americans had to prove anything to white America and deeply resented the idea of fighting in a segregated military for the freedom of everybody but his own people. And he was a proud American, he was a patriot and he was proud to serve, but he was painfully aware of the dichotomy and the irony of that experience and profoundly offended by the racism that he endured all through his upbringing and indeed into his adulthood. He ended up leaving Tuskegee, he went to the University of California at Berkeley, became a PhD in economics. He was a professor at Cornell for many years and then worked in the Treasury Department and the World Bank and ultimately became a governor of the Federal Reserve. And his big struggle was to figure out how to fulfill his potential, how to become what he knew he could be in a society that was telling him at every turn he couldn't, when he got, he couldn't get a job on the West Coast in academia. He couldn't get a job in the private sector. He got his first job out of graduate school at Cornell because they didn't know he was black until he showed up and they thankfully didn't put him out. And he had the opportunity to grow and my dad taught me so much. I speak a lot about the lessons he taught us in the book but one of the most important things he taught us was to believe in ourselves and to recognize that we were gonna encounter racism, we were gonna encounter bigotry and all those things were extremely real barriers, many of which we may not be able to control but we did have control over how we viewed ourselves. And he taught us that bigotry is to a great extent a function of the bigot's own insecurity. And so as the recipient of that bigotry, you have a choice. You can either let the other person's definition of you become your own or you can sort of develop the muscles to perform a sort of psychological jiu-jitsu and push that insecurity back on them and understand your own self-worth, not to let anybody else define you for you. And that's how we were raised. He had a pithy expression for that. Well, he had two pithy expressions. One was don't take crap off of anybody and he told us this over and again, if somebody's trying to dismiss you or dog you or bully you, you don't take it, you push back, you stand up for yourself. And the other thing he understood as he got older and he taught us was a view that summarized his perspective on race and that was if my being black is gonna be a problem, it's gonna be a problem for somebody else, not for me. In other words, I have to know who I am, I have to believe in myself and if they don't think I belong, that's their problem. So fast forward to when I'm a young African-American female assistant secretary of state, breastfeeding a child and I arguably don't belong, at least not yet, at least not then. And I was very aware of other people's perceptions of me but I realized I had two choices, either to let them define me for me, in other words, to believe that I didn't belong and to act like I didn't belong or to say to hell with it, I'm capable, I'm qualified, I might be young, I might make mistakes but I can do this job and I do belong and they're gonna have to get used to it. And many of them did, some didn't and some became and remained committed detractors. It's okay, that's fine. So you're coming into this, I mean it's an amazing story, your parents is really amazing, mother of Pell Grants on one side, second African-American Federal Reserve Board Governor on the other, real forces that shaped you. So I think you tell that story beautifully in the book. You also talk a lot in the book about missteps you made along the way and I wanna just focus for now on, when you were younger, your first experience in government in the Clinton administration, Broderick Johnson's here, served with us under President Clinton and President Obama, I think he would agree, you and I had maybe shared a little trait when we were, hopefully just when we were younger, of maybe a little excessive arrogance. You think? Maybe pushing a little bit too hard. No, no, wait a minute. Yes, how about an abundance of self-confidence? An abundance of self-confidence. Which is really useful. Arrogance implies dismissing other people. But sometimes you made mistakes you talk about in the book on that. And so I want you to talk a little bit about maybe one of the mistakes you made that came out of the abundance of self-confidence. And you had some schooling in that and I think it'd be useful to talk about that. Well, I describe a number of experiences in the book which were growth experiences. But I think that the one that's most stark in some ways was early in my tenure as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. So I'd probably be in the job about a year. So I was 33-ish, maybe close to 34. 1998 was my first full calendar year in that role. And we had in that year, in addition to President Clinton's first and extensive trip to Africa. You went to six countries in 10 days. It was a highly successful trip. But after that, the wheels came off the bus. The war broke out in between Ethiopia and Eritrea. You know, war resumed in Angola. In Congo, six countries got involved in the Congolese civil conflict. It became known as Africa's First World War. I mean, Liberia blew up, hold on, yeah, I'm getting there. Liberia blew up Sudan, South Sudan. We're at each other's door still. And then in August of 1998, Al Qaeda attacked two of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Killing 12 Americans in Kenya, over 200 Kenyans, and wounding thousands. And though the death toll was lower in Tanzania and no Americans were killed in Tanzania, we lost Tanzanian colleagues who served in the embassy. And it was a devastating experience for all of us. These were our colleagues in the Africa Bureau. And yet, through all of this, we had to support the families, we had to support the FBI and the FBI investigation. We had to do all these things that come with a crisis like that and a terrorist attack. And it was consuming and overwhelming. And the only way I knew how to deal with that is just to stay focused, to forge forward, to not get overwhelmed by emotion, but just to charge through it. And at the same time, in addition to what we had already suffered, we had a constant stream of threats that were credible threats targeting other embassies on the African continent. And so we were playing whack-a-mole, closing embassies here and there, opening them up, dealing with these threat streams without the ability to do the reconstruction that quickly that was necessary to harden our embassies at a time when many of our embassies in Africa were situated in vulnerable places and had old school construction. And I was, my leadership style in that context, as I said, was just hard ass, nose to the grindstone, just charged through it. And I was incredibly fortunate to have a colleague at the end of that year ask me out to lunch. This is somebody who may be known to some of you here, a man named Howard Wolpey. Howard Wolpey was congressman from Michigan. He was the former chair of the House Africa Subcommittee for many years, an extraordinarily brilliant, kind, funny gentleman. And at that point, he was serving as President Clinton's special envoy for the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, working with me in the Africa Bureau. And he took me out to lunch. I thought it was just supposed to be a social lunch at one of these particularly mediocre Chinese restaurant near the State Department called The Magic Gourd. I'm waiting for them to sue me because I don't treat them nicely in the book. Anyway, they're not gonna be the first one in that book to sue you. They may be the only one with standing to sue me. Anyway, we go out to lunch and we're barely into the meal. When he says to me, you know, Susan, you're going to fail in this job if you don't dramatically change course. You're smart, you've got the support of the Secretary and the President, you have a vision, you have drive, but you're too impatient. You're not sufficiently inclusive of your colleagues. You're not taking on their advice and experience. You're making them feel excluded and not valued. And if you don't change the way you lead, you're gonna lose them and you're gonna fail. And I was not expecting that. But as soon as he started talking, I realized he was saying something really important. And I realized that he didn't have to do this. He could have just let me fail. And a lot of folks would have been happy. But he cared. And he was, as I said at the outset, coming from the perspective of somebody who had my best interest at heart. And I could, I saw that immediately and I listened carefully. And I didn't argue, I asked questions and tried to understand the best I could, you know, where I was messing up and what kinds of things I could do better. And I took the time over that Christmas break to really think through and absorb what he said. And I was able to change course and to do better and to become a much more effective leader of teams and people. And I think quite honestly, if I hadn't, if he hadn't intervened and told me the hard truths I needed to hear, given me that tough love, I probably would not have been able to do the jobs that I was asked to do subsequently. I probably wouldn't have been asked and wouldn't have been deemed ready for that. So it was an extraordinary gift. And I'll always be grateful to him, not just for that, but for so many other things as well. And I've tried to, as I've gotten more senior, where I see younger colleagues with real potential and great skills, but something that I thought was holding them back to be as candid with them as Howard was with me. That's great. So I wanna fast forward the story a bit to 2007. Your decision to throw your hat in with then candidate Obama. That was a risky decision at the time for you. You had been very attached to the Clinton administration, to the Clintons. People early on did not expect President Obama to defeat then First Lady Clinton. For a long time. Until the very end. And it cost you personally and professionally. It was hard to make that choice. So how did you go about making the decision? How did you have the, how did you think about that choice? It wasn't a hard choice at all. I first of all, I was extremely proud and grateful to have served under President Clinton for eight years in three different roles. And I had and still have great admiration and respect for him. And for then Senator Clinton, who later became my colleague in the Obama administration. But I had worked with her also while she was First Lady. She took trips to Africa and our work intersected. So my choice in 2007 to join with Obama was not a choice against the Clintons in any way, shape, or form. It was a choice in favor of Obama. And for me, I'd gotten to know Obama a bit when he was running for the Senate in 2004. I was working for another failed Democratic presidential campaign, this time the John Kerry campaign, much better than the previous Dukakis campaign, but still unsuccessful. And it was in that context that I first met Barack Obama. And then later, when he came to the Senate and began to serve on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and got very much engaged in international issues, he called on me and we met. And I try to provide perspectives or briefings. And he asked me to work on the foreign policy chapter of his second book, The Audacity of Hope. And so that's when we really got to begin to know each other. And then in 2007, when he decided to run for president, he asked me to co-lead his effort to establish a pool of outside national security advisors, or foreign policy advisors, and to be a surrogate for him and advisor and do debate prep and all that stuff. And the reason why it wasn't a hard choice is because Obama, for me, represented the future. Remember, this is 2007. He represented my belief and my hope for what this country could be. And for the first time in my lifetime, in my experience, I had found a leader of my generation who also happened to be African-American whose policy views and instincts I'd shared almost entirely and whose victory, if it could be achieved, I thought would be a powerful, powerful statement of our country's ability to grow. And so I recognized that he may well not win. I think I gave it a little more, the prospect of him becoming president, a little more credence than some might have. But it was still a huge long shot. And I was very explicitly warned by friends and colleagues who were working closely with Secretary Clinton or then Senator Clinton that if I stuck with Obama, I should expect not to, well, I think the term used was, that's likely to be a career-ending move. I didn't take that, by the way, as a threat. And I don't think it was intended as a threat, but it was a sort of statement of fact almost in their judgment. And I just did what I thought was right. I knew it was right for me. And I was prepared for whatever consequences. That turned out to have been a good choice. It did turn out to be a good choice. Who would have funked? You then go on to be President Obama names you as Ambassador to the UN. You become his National Security Advisor. I'm going to go into the substance of all that in just a minute. I want to spend a little time talking about Sunday shows. OK, but before we do that, which we will do. Go for it. I just want to acknowledge that the great, wonderful Congresswoman Debbie Dingle walked in. And this is being her district. So this is one of the many ways you know that Susan Rice is a professional ambassador and diplomat. She can both pay 100% attention to me and also know everybody in the audience. Not everybody. Anyway, OK, I wasn't trying to divert attention, but. Well, that's an interesting word you just used. There was a lot of criticism. You went on the Sunday shows after a tragedy at the Benghazi diplomatic facilities in Libya. There was an attack on the embassy there, not the embassy. But Chris Hill, who was the US ambassador, was killed. None of them. Chris Stevens. Chris Stevens. Chris Hill, thankfully, is still alive. I'm sorry. OK. And three other Americans passed away. And you were asked to go out on the Sunday shows. You go out on the Sunday shows. And that turned out to have been just a disastrous mess. Can you describe why that mattered? Why did it matter to go out on the Sunday shows? What happened? What did it do with your career? So I write about this. There's a chapter in the book on Benghazi. And I begin by explaining how it all came about. And that is it was a Friday afternoon. The terrorist attack occurred on Tuesday. And it also came in the context of several of our diplomatic facilities in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia facing protests and demonstrations, many of them that had turned violent, all in a wave. But what happened at Benghazi turned out to be qualitatively different. The only place where it was a straight-up terrorist attack and we lost American lives. I was asked that Friday afternoon by the White House if I would be willing to go on the Sunday shows to represent the administration and discuss what had happened. They had already asked Secretary Clinton. She had declined. And I assume others perhaps, too. And I had had some understanding, quite frankly, going back to my experience with our embassy bombings in East Africa of what kind of emotional, physical, and psychological toll losing your colleagues for who you were responsible takes on a senior policymaker. And so I've been questioned for reasons for not wanting to go on the shows. I just assumed that it was enough already after a horrible week. I said, this is not what I was planning to do on the weekend. I was actually, forgive me for saying this here, but I was taking my two kids to Ohio State to watch Ohio State play Berkeley. You're a big risk taker. It was my kid's first big 10-football game. That was my plan for the weekend, not to go on five Sunday shows, but I said I would. And that evening, as I was driving home from work, I stopped. By the way, I'm UN ambassador now, so I'm living and working in New York most days. I come home when I can on the weekends, where my family is still back in Washington. I stopped by my mother's house. At this point, my mom is quite frail and ill. She'd had five cancer surgeries. She had a stroke following her last surgery. She was weak physically, recovering from the stroke, but mentally still quite sharp. And I went to check on her on my way home, because I didn't get to see her every day since I'm not living in town. And I walk into her kitchen. And as usual, she's got CNN blaring on the television. And she says, what are you doing this weekend? And I say, well, I'm taking the kids to Ohio State. And then I'm going on the Sunday shows to talk about what's happened this week. And she looks at me. And she goes, why you? And I explain what I just said. And she says, I smell a rat. Don't do it. I'm like, mom, don't be ridiculous. I've done this many times before. It'll be fine. I could have entitled this book Always Listen to Your Mother. That would have been appropriate as well. But what my mom was thinking, which was not what I was thinking, she was thinking about me. She was thinking about what's good for her daughter. And she just felt intuitively that it was a risky venture to go and be one of the first people out of the box on national television to talk about a tragic terrorist attack that was already becoming politicized in the middle of a hot campaign. I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about being a member of a team. We have suffered a tragedy. Somebody had to speak, and I said yes. So I go on the Sunday shows, and I use the information that had been provided to me by our intelligence community, the so-called talking points, the unclassified talking points, that conveyed our current best knowledge of what had happened. And I stuck to them faithfully. I knew them to be up-to-date and accurate because I consumed that intelligence every day. I received and read the president's daily briefing. And just the Saturday morning, before I got on the plane to take the kids to Ohio State, I had my briefing. And so I knew that what I was being asked to say was indeed what we knew to be the case. But not long after I shared our current best understanding, the information we had evolved. And it turned out, long story short, that in about 10 days after I went on the shows, the intelligence community came out and put out a public statement saying that the information they had given me and members of Congress and other policymakers had been updated and revised and was inaccurate in a few certain respects. Fast forward after all the investigations and all of the reviews of the information, the talking points I used turned out to be wrong in one critical respect. There was no demonstration outside of our diplomatic compound in Benghazi. But the other aspects actually over time ended up holding up. But in the meantime, I was branded a liar. I was, my congressmen were calling for my head. Certain senators called me incompetent or untrustworthy. It was a steady stream of attacks on my character, my integrity, my intelligence for months. And it continued all through the election campaign. And it was very, very upsetting to my mother, who just couldn't turn off the television on the one hand and couldn't stand to see my character attacked. Hard on my family as well. And yet I had assumed that when the election was over that the politics would die down and that I could go back to doing my job on harassed as an ambassador. I was also in that same time being considered by the president as one of at least two people for Secretary of State in his second term. And after the election, to my surprise, the drumbeat among Republicans in Congress, particularly in the Senate, intensified rather than diminish. And their aim was to try to prevent President Obama from nominating me to become Secretary of State or if nominated to try to make it very difficult for me to get confirmed. And so elections in early November, this continues and intensifies. I go into more detail in the book on all this so I won't waste your time. But the bottom line is that by mid-December, I made the judgment that rather than if the president were going to select me, and it was, I had no inside knowledge of what his thinking was, that it was best, from my perspective, to withdraw my name from consideration. And that's what I did. I was thinking of my family on the one hand, but also, frankly, even more so, because I think my family probably could have hung in there with me. Thinking about the president's second term agenda and the many things that he had on his plate to do, we were dealing with the fiscal cliff, we wanted to take on immigration reform, many other things. And I just thought that even though I was likely to be confirmed, we had a Democratic majority in the Senate at that point. It would have been a long, ugly, costly battle that would have distracted from what we needed to get done. And so I made the judgment that I should withdraw my name. And I did. And I continued to work as you an ambassador. And then about six months later, I was named National Security Advisor. Not a bad job. Not a bad job at all. So from my personal vantage point, I mean, I feel extraordinarily privileged and blessed to have been able to serve both in the president's cabinet at the UN, but then subsequently at the White House as National Security Advisor. I don't feel as if I lost out in that regard. But what I do feel and what I write about, and I am quite plain about it being part of the motivation for writing the book, was that for years on cable television, depending what station you listen to, I was characterized as a villain or a victim or a vanquishing heroine. All these crazy characterizations that had no resemblance to who I am and where I come from and what motivates me. And yet as a public servant representing the United States, speaking on behalf of the country and the president, I was not and could not and should not be speaking on my own behalf. And telling my own story. And so part of why I wanted to write Tough Love was not only to sort of share what I'd learned through the experience of my family, my growing up, my service in government, but also to do what my father always taught us, which is define yourself for yourself, which I couldn't do while I was serving. So this is my best effort to tell the story of who I am and where I came from and the forces that influenced me and what I learned and where I screwed up and where I think we got it right. And hopefully to do it in a way that's helpful to others, that impart some of this learning in a fashion that can be utilized by others. I think it very much does. And a very important theme in the book and in your life is your family. One of the interesting things in your family is that you have an encapsulation of some of the political struggles we're going through as a country inside your family. Yeah. I love Susan's children. Marist is here. Her daughter Marist is here. And Jake is at Stanford. And Jake is a prominent conservative Republican leader on campus at Stanford. And so how would you describe how you as a family navigate these very different politics inside your own home? Well, Ian and I tried to raise our kids to think for themselves, to be independent minded, to have the courage of their convictions. And unfortunately, that's what happened. Yeah. Marist, I won't characterize her views for her in front of her. But let's say her views are at least as progressive as ours and probably more so. And Jake's are substantially to the other side. And it weren't always so. I mean, he evolved, too. And I'm very proud of them both. I love them both mightily. I disagree a lot with Jake on issues and substance. And sometimes those disagreements get heated. And sometimes the dinner discussions get lively. But I'm blessed to have two smart, committed kids who care about public issues and are prepared to stand up for what they believe. So it's not easy. I mean, there are times when it strains are the fabric of our family life. But at the end of the day, we've made a conscious decision that what we share as a family and that love and that bond is more important than politics or policy and that we're going to fight to keep our family intact. We didn't talk about another aspect of my upbringing. But I've talked about my parents and how wonderful they were. And all that's true. But they had no business ever being married to each other. And they had a horrible marriage and a very ugly, protracted divorce and custody battle that my brother and I endured from basically age seven to 15. And that was a powerfully formative experience. It was very painful and challenging. But it also taught me resilience. And one of the things that I'm committed to having lost the integrity of my original family, even though thankfully I had still two parents who were very much in my life and very much involved in my life. They just weren't able to live under the same roof. I'm going to fight to keep my current family whole. And it's not always easy, but it's really important. And the good news is I think we all share that commitment. I'm going to ask Susan one last question. I'm going to turn it over to the students to take your question. So obviously we're here celebrating Martin Luther King Day. And in your book, you repeat his phrase, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And then you add, but nobody is going to do the hard bending if not you and me. So what advice can you give to our students about how to begin that task of bending? Well, first of all, I spend the last chapter of the book, a chapter called Bridging the Divide, talking about the challenges we're facing today as a nation. I start with the family and talk about how within the four walls of our household, we're facing the challenges of political division. But then I talk about my very strong view that our domestic political divisions are now our greatest national security vulnerability. And I believe that for many reasons, preventing us from getting important things done, like competing optimally with the rising China. It's giving our adversaries like the Russians a very easy opening to exacerbate our divisions and pour salt in the wounds of our divides, whether about race or immigration or gay rights or guns. And their aim is to weaken us and divide us from within, supplant our global leadership, and do it without ever firing a bullet by virtue of exacerbating those divisions, which they do every day on social media. Not just, by the way, interfering in our elections as important and concerning as that is. But every day, all day, Russian-controlled entities are playing on both sides of the issues pitting us against each other, and causing us to distrust and even hate each other. And we've got to confront that. And so what I say is that I offer a number of paths to confront those divisions and try to heal them from how we educate ourselves and our children, how we engage with one another on a personal and human level, how we structure our political system, our voting systems, how the role of money in politics, I mean, they're all kinds of things, how our media is organized. And yet, at the end of the day, we get to decide who's representing us, who's leading us, who's governing for us. And we can't afford to sit on the sidelines and either be disengaged or complaint. We each have to get in the arena and participate. Minimally, we have to register and vote, minimally. But more importantly, hopefully, we'll be encouraging others to come into the arena. We'll be engaging ourselves, perhaps running for office ourselves. But ensuring that our voice is the voice that carries the day. And obviously, in a place as important as the state of Michigan, the call to each of us to exercise and insist on our right to vote and express ourselves is more important than ever before. And so there are many ways that we can each be part of bending that arc of the moral universe. But if we sort of think it's somebody else's problem, or somebody else will vote, or my vote doesn't matter, or my engagement in the issues of the day, in activism, in whatever it is that moves you, whether it's guns, or climate, or injustice, or the criminal justice system, or immigration reform, whatever it is, you have got to be involved. You cannot be a bystander. And when we stand by, stuff happens to us rather than for us or on our behalf. That's great. Let me ask our students to begin the audience questioning. Good afternoon, Madam Ambassador. Thank you so much for being here today. My name is Amy Turner. I'm a first-year master of public policy student interest in international economics, trade, and security issues. Our first question is, we discussed today that you rose quickly to high-ranking positions in the US government. What do you believe are the one or two traits that most helped you stand out in your early career in which you recommend to our graduate students, especially women and women of color, hoping to succeed in government? Well, I think that I was fortunate in a number of regards. One, I had excellent education and very strong academic foundation that I carried with me into my early career. Having been able to have my doctorate early in my work, I guess by the time I was 25, whether I'd been 25 or 30, that degree, and I think certainly some advanced degree on top of a strong undergraduate foundation is really important. Being hardworking and prepared, you can't mail it in these days, any day, really. You've got to be as good as you possibly can be and take the time to be maximally prepared. I think that's particularly important for women and for people of color because you're not going to be cut any slack. You're not going to necessarily get a second chance to make a first impression. And so that preparation is vital. And then I guess I'd say, and I'd try to underscore this to my kids as well, being able to express yourself effectively, succinctly, with confidence, both in writing and orally is hugely important. The business of government, particularly of foreign policy, national security diplomacy, is often the business of analysis, of assessing various courses of action and their implications, and being able to express those assessments and analyses effectively, being able to communicate and make an argument, and be persuasive to senior people who will ultimately have to take on board your views, your inputs, your recommendations. And so those skills are vitally important. So I'd start with education preparation and those written and oral communication skills. And then I guess I'd also say, take it to the extent you possibly can, be open to the wisdom and the feedback of seniors, of mentors. I was very fortunate early in my career to have men and women, mostly actually white men, who were my early bosses, who took an interest in me and thought I had some potential and helped me to gain the skills and experiences that I needed to step up and do the next thing. And mentors come in all flavors, shapes, and sizes, but being willing to embrace the wisdom of people who are prepared to share it is also something I learned to be extremely valuable. Thank you. My name is Victor Atting, first year MPP student, interested in international policy. My home country is Kenya, which I've just seen is one of the topics you covered in your book. The question we have today is, the United States diplomacy under the Trump administration has bond bridges with our allies and transnational organizations like the United Nations. What steps should we take to rebuild and restore the US's role in the international community? That's the question of the moment. Well, first of all, we've got to change leadership. Secondly, we need a Congress that is fulfilling its responsibilities. Because the leadership in the White House is obvious. If we're talking about how we repair and restore our critical relationships with allies and partners that have been undermined by a transactional America first or me first or whatever you want to call it, kind of leadership style. But I think among the many things that have rattled our allies and partners around the world is that those things that we all always took for granted, and I think many of our foreign partners took for granted, as the guardrails of our democracy have shown how fragile they are. You know, it turns out that much of what we've come to expect as normal, appropriate behavior is a function of norms, not rules or laws. There's no law that says that we're supposed to have a White House press secretary who gives a daily briefing. There's no law that says that that person is supposed to tell the truth. There's no law that says the President of the United States or members of his cabinet have to tell the truth. There's no law actually, even after Watergate, where the norms were changed, that the White House is not supposed to interfere in the business of the Justice Department, except through proper channels and very limited cases. And the separation of powers and the checks and balances, the role of the court, who have largely stood up, but also the role of Congress has proved to be inadequate to the moment. In particular, leadership that is unwilling in the Senate, notably, to provide oversight to uphold their constitutional responsibilities. And that, I think, has totally freaked out. All those things have freaked out our allies and partners. Because what it reveals is that supposedly one of the longest-standing, continuous democracies in the world that has prided itself on, for better or for worse, being a model, this is a pretty fragile enterprise. And so I think our partners are looking to a reassertion not only of a different type of leadership in the White House, but also the other two branches demonstrating their strength and their independence. So that's one thing. But the other thing I want to stress is that it is not going to be at all easy or automatic to regain the trust and confidence of our allies and partners around the world. I don't think one can overstate the amount of damage done, the amount of confidence lost. And it ranges from everything. It used to be that if the United States made an agreement with other countries, and it was a formal agreement, if not a treaty, even treaties, for that matter, that successor administrations of whatever party would honor those agreements, the reason we used to do that is because why would any country on any issue or any group of countries make an agreement with the United States if their expectation is that in two years, four years, eight years, it's going to be undone? That's not how the world has worked. So now the world has to wonder, even if there's change in November, what's keeping it from flipping back the other way again? What's keeping us from being completely unpredictable and inconstant? So it's going to be the work of more than one president, even more than one two-term president, to restore that confidence. This is a long-term endeavor. And when you think about how so many of our institutions and government have been hollowed out, hemorrhaging talent, hemorrhaging years of experience, the State Department, the Justice Department, the intelligence community, that's just on the national security side of the ledger. We've lost talent and knowledge and experience, and that too is going to take many years to recoup. So this is a long-term project, and we're going to have to recognize that we're going to have to approach it with patience, with humility, and with a recognition that we have a lot of collective work to do. The State Department seems like such a massive bureaucracy. Do you have any tips for managing the department for someone looking to enter its ranks? Well, first of all, when you enter, you don't have to manage it. That's the good news. But you do have to find your way. First of all, just for context, I mean, as big as the State Department may feel, it's not actually that big compared to many other agencies. I mean, you want big, go to the Defense Department. That's big. But the State Department is a culturally unique institution. It evolves. It's more diverse, or at least it was. No, seriously. No, not nearly as much as it should be. But there was a time when women and African-Americans were filing class-action suits against the State Department with real reason. So it is, and I can tell you, it is a different place. It was a different place in 2016 than it was in 1993 when I started in government. But it's also a culturally conservative place, small sea conservative, meaning that it doesn't reward easily the outspoken, the squeaky wheel, the revolutionary. But it does allow for talent to show itself and to develop and to rise. The challenge with a career in the State Department, I highly recommend government service, public service, including the Foreign Service and the Civil Service. But the challenge with a State Department career is that it is a long career trajectory. And they haven't figured out yet, and this is something I think they really need to do, how to make service in the State Department attractive, even if you're not prepared to be there for 25 years, long enough to become an ambassador. How do we get that talent, utilize the skills that would be so beneficial, and make it a meaningful experience for three years, five years, seven years? That's going to require lots of changes. But it is a place where knowledge and experience is valued and a place where you get extraordinary opportunities to serve, not only in Washington but overseas in very important and interesting places. And a lot of what you get out of those foreign tours is what you put into it. If you want to stay at your computer and behind the blast walls of the embassy and never get out, you can do that. You won't be a very good reporting officer. Or you can actually, to the extent possible, in the security context, get out and really engage the country, the people, the society in which you're in, and make you much, much more valuable asset to the enterprise of the State Department and to our decision making in Washington. So the question is this, what is the appropriate policy response to Russian interference in the US elections system? To prevent it, to the extent we can. I write in the book in the chapter called The Fourth Quarter about how we wrestled with this challenge in 2016 when in August it became obvious that the Russians were at the highest levels actively trying to interfere in our election and our democratic process. And I write about how we confronted that information, how we tried to respond in terms of shoring up the integrity of our electoral systems, the challenges we faced from Congress where, believe it or not, we couldn't get bipartisan leadership to agree on the importance of the challenge we faced and of warning the American people. I talk about what we tried to do at the state level to encourage the states to harden their systems, the punitive responses we had readied, the efforts that we made to communicate the challenge to the American people and the things that came in our way as we did it. And we were especially concerned then with what we thought would be the most egregious manifestation of Russian interference if they chose to go this far, which was the fear that they could somehow manipulate the physical voter tallies. Either change votes, which is very hard to do because our systems thankfully are for the most part not connected to the internet, but not perhaps impossible, but more likely and still deeply worrying that they could corrupt the voter registration records and take people off the rolls, add people on, show up at the polls and all of a sudden you're dead or you don't exist or what have you. We were most concerned about that. And I think we, fortunately in 2016, prior to the election, as much as we were looking for that did not see it. But what we were insufficiently appreciative of is the extent to which the Russians beyond the potential to physically manipulate the voting process was getting in the heads and the minds of the American voter themselves through social media, through the means I described earlier of taking on personas using bots, playing on both sides of every debate, discouraging African American voters from coming to the polls, all these sorts of things. And that was something that we didn't fully grasp the gravity of. And we were behind the curve in responding to. And now we know it, now we see it. And yet, because we can't move legislation through two houses of Congress to address this adequately, some of these vulnerabilities remain unaddressed. Or inadequately addressed. So we have to insist on, first of all, there's legislation pending on the Hill, sitting on the Senate Majority Leader's desk that would take our preparedness to confront foreign electoral interference to a new level. Mandate paper balance as backup. Mandate sanctions against anybody caught interfering. There are a whole variety of steps in that legislation. And it's mind-boggling that, on something that affects everybody on the ballot, whatever your party, whatever your state, whether you're a local official or running for president, is something we all should care about. It's mind-boggling that we haven't been able to do that. And there are other steps, obviously, as well, how we approach social media, truth in advertising on social media. And there are all kinds of things that involve the tech companies who, I think, sadly, have not, for the most part, stepped up as they should. But it's all geared towards the imperative of making it as difficult as possible and to met out punishment as appropriate when it happens. But it's also about educating ourselves. This is a hugely important piece. This is where we get some measure of control as citizens over this. We're the consumers of information on our social media. You all get to decide what is fact, what is fiction, what do you believe. Are you going to be educated, thoughtful, rigorous consumers of information? Are you just gonna believe anything that's on your social media feed because some friend sent it to you? We have to be much better prepared as citizens and voters for this new environment. So, unfortunately, I think this is gonna be our final question from the audience and. Balancing ambitious and pragmatic objectives seems to be an important part of diplomacy. How did you go about balancing ambition and pragmatism in your diplomatic career? Well, there's so many ways I could go with that question, I'm not sure where to take it. But I think, let me talk about it from the point of view of a policymaker. And I may not be exactly what the questioner is getting at, but to me, the challenge of making policy, particularly at high levels where it's intense. How hard do you push? Well, what I was gonna say is, you can be extremely busy every day of the week managing your inbox, the crises, the things that are coming at you, that you don't have necessarily any control over, but that will keep you extremely busy. And so, for us in the Obama administration, it would be things like Russian interference or the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the outbreak of an Ebola epidemic or the resurgence of ISIS. These are all big, huge problems that you have to deal with. You don't get to ignore. But the challenge in my judgment is, how do you not just manage the inbox and the crush of crises? How do you actually at the same time pursue an ambitious, affirmative agenda? The things that you came in to set out to do that you think would make the United States our policy, our relationship to the world, the world itself a better place. And so, this balance of the necessary, the crises, the things that are in your inbox with the ambitious, affirmative agenda that you wanna pursue, and being able to do both, that's a huge challenge. And so, in the Obama administration, again, what were the things that were, that we didn't have to do, that we aimed to do, the Paris Climate Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement, the opening to Iran through the nuclear deal, the opening to Cuba. I could go, you know, many of our development initiatives in Africa, Power Africa, the young leaders initiatives globally, Feed the Future, which was an agricultural initiative, what we invested in healthcare and the global health security agenda. I mean, there's a whole long litany of things, some of which you all have never heard of, some of which the Trump administration is not yet undone. I have to maintain a little sense of humor otherwise it gets hard. That really add up to positive, important impact. And one of the things I had to learn early on, going back to my time working on Africa, where same kind of challenge, tons of crises, but things we wanted to do that made a lasting positive difference, like the African Growth and Opportunity Act. You have to be able to figure out how to manage both simultaneously. And what I learned, particularly by the time I became national security advisor, where you don't get to opt out of the crises, but you don't want to be unable to pursue the affirmative stuff, is that you have to rely on your team and empower your team to be doing all these things simultaneously. So I had team working on ISIS, I had a team working on, how do we establish a global health security agenda so that the next time there's an outbreak of pandemic flu or Ebola or Zika or whatever, that countries around the world have greater capacity to detect and contain that. The team working on the Iran deal or opening to Cuba was working with my guidance and oversight in parallel to the folks who are worrying about how do we organize sanctions against Russia because they invaded Crimea and Ukraine. So you have to walk and chew gum at the same time and do that at every level of your experience, even when you're a desk officer in the State Department. Same thing, there's some good things lasting positive changes you want to be able to work on at the same time as you're dealing with the absolute necessities. And if you have that duality in mind and a conscious determination to do both, I think you'll be much more effective, but it'll also be much more gratifying work. Wow, a wonderful discussion, just a great range of topics. We're just, thank you all very much.