 I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and I am just simply delighted to see all of you here with us this evening. It is wonderful to see so many familiar faces and to have had the opportunity to meet some new friends of the school as well. Well before I introduce our speakers this evening, it is a great pleasure to thank Mr. Glenn Goldberg who was the President of McGraw Hills Financial Commodities and Commercial Markets for so graciously arranging this truly lovely venue for our event this evening. I also wanted to thank the City Foundation for their continued support of our lecture series. Well tonight it is a great honor to introduce two very distinguished statesmen who served together in the Ford Administration, the Honorable Dr. Henry Kissinger and the Honorable Paul O'Neill. Well you'll see from their biographies in the program that both of our speakers have had a number of key positions in both private sector and of course in public service as well. Dr. Kissinger is of course an icon in the fields of international relations and American foreign policy. A recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Kissinger is Chairman of the International Consulting Firm Kissinger Associates and he also served as the 56th Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to President Nixon and President Ford. Both a diplomat and a scholar, Dr. Kissinger's opinions continue to be sought after on matters of foreign policy and national security as you well know. Dr. Kissinger also recently celebrated his 90th birthday and it is a great pleasure to wish him many happy returns on this occasion as well. Mr. O'Neill served as the 72nd Secretary of the Treasury. He joined the White House Office of Management and Budget in 1967 and served as the Deputy Director of OMB during the Ford Administration. He was Chairman and CEO of Alcoa until his retirement as well as Chairman of the RAND Corporation. Mr. O'Neill has been a very good friend to the Ford School as well and he was a leader among the generous donors who helped us to build the wonderful Wild Hall and just last month he delivered the charge to the class of 2013 and we very much appreciated that. Our students, our speakers have agreed to discuss their experiences serving in the Ford Administration and also their opinions on current events and issues that are extremely topical but before they begin I'd like to explain just very briefly why the Ford School has decided to host the event this evening. Well as many of you know 2013 marks the 100th anniversary of President Ford's birth and tonight's event continues the Ford School's year long celebration of President Ford's remarkable life and career. The naming of the University of Michigan School of Public Policy for President Ford in 1999 was really a key transformational event that linked us both to a great man whose decency and commitment to public service continues to inspire our students and broader members of our community today. But that naming also created an energy and a momentum that has allowed us to continue hiring top tier faculty to launch an undergraduate degree program and to build Wild Hall. Well now we are just a few months away from our next transformational effort and that is that in 2014 the Ford School will recognize another centennial, the 100th anniversary of our school's founding. This milestone arrives at the start of a university wide effort to secure funds that will significantly enhance the student experience on campus and will invest in the next century of citizens, public servants and leaders trained at the Ford School. Well many members of the Ford School committee who have helped us to set that path are in the room tonight and we're delighted to have them here with us. We hope that our commemoration of these back to back centennials will inspire all of you to join the friends of the Ford School as active supporters in the coming months and the years of the campaign. Well your printed program and the slideshow that played during the reception and I hope you had a chance to see a number of the pictures of our students and the activities in our facilities. They really highlight that year long celebration and across all of these centennial events it has been a real pleasure to meet friends and colleagues of President Ford. I'd like to highlight that friends and colleagues description. President Ford's colleagues really continue to consider him a friend and whether it was across the aisle or across a nation President Ford really had a gift for bringing people together. Dr. Kissinger I think that you articulated that sentiment in the naming of the Ford School in 2000 and at that point you said and I quote that Washington is about power. It's very rare indeed it's unheard of that so many people who were associated with the Ford Administration were friends then and have remained friends throughout the remainder of their lives and here tonight we have two lifelong friends of President Ford. We also have an audience full of people whose own friendships began at the Ford School and so Dr. Kissinger and Mr. O'Neill I think it's safe to say that that very important legacy of many of President Ford's is still alive and well. And now for the main event here is our format Dr. Kissinger and Mr. O'Neill will start their conversation on the legacy of President Ford and then they will move on to a discussion of some of today's top policy issues. They'll save the last 20 minutes of the time for questions and answers and discussion with the audience and so with no further ado it is my great honor to turn the floor over to Paul O'Neill. Thank you Dean Collins. It's really a pleasure to be here tonight. I should tell you Dr. Kissinger is wonderful in so many different ways. He's got a vocal cord problem so he's protecting his voice but he was good enough even with this new thing that he's not old enough to have that he found his way here tonight so it's so wonderful to see you Henry. I think it would be useful at the beginning maybe to pick up on a little conversation we were having before we came in. Henry if you first and then I will follow you talk a little bit about President Ford the man that you worked with and how you saw him then and see him in retrospect. I've known ten presidents and one of the main characteristics of presidents is that they spent a great deal of their life in pursuit of the office and so whatever their differences they're very conscious of public opinion they're very concerned increasingly as time has gone on this was not so true I would say of Eisenhower but they're very concerned with such things as focus groups and Ford never expected to be president never thought to be president he was transported into it by a catastrophe and the expectations were not high because he had had no executive experience and he took over at a moment when the administration was in a shambles opposition internationally extremely difficult because so much depends on credibility and countries from all over the world looking at him to see what he might do next the outstanding characteristic of president Ford was that what you saw was what you got you did not have to worry he did not maneuver he did not care about focus groups one of the actually big mistakes we made in that sense I told him at in there was an April 76 before most of you were born there was an issue in southern Africa and I said to him we have to put ourselves on the side of majority rule in Rhodesia and Namibia and I said I would secretary of state I said I'm planning to go there and the in whenever the date and I realized that this is two weeks before the Texas primary and if you want me to I can put it off a few months he said no we're not making the foreign policy depend on my primary and the primary was a disaster because in Texas they were not for majority rule in Rhodesia and Namibia in those days but he made strong decisions he created a warm atmosphere he had no obsessions about camera angles all the things you read about now that it was not a rehearse presidency it was a Midwest figure who did what he thought was best for his country and as I said I've known ten presidents this is not to talk them down they all were men of substance but Ford was in the human category by itself and as it turned out well equipped for the job because he had been on the armed services committee so he knew a lot about the security aspect of foreign policy and one of the again from the foreign policy side interesting things is as a Midwestern and from a relatively small town he was exactly the sort of guy that European intellectual leaders might look down on it's naive but as it turned out he became a close personal friend of people like Helmut Schmidt this guy is saying through the rest of his life when he could do nothing for them but they went all the way out to Denver or to Aspen year after year Trudeau from Canada who was if I may say so somewhat snobbish and he became a good friend but when we get to the questions I'd be glad to answer so let me reminisce just a little bit as well about my connection with President Ford I was long ago I was a graduate student in public policy at Indiana University it's another place you may have heard of and I came into the government actually in 1961 sounds maybe naive now but you know and Kennedy said if you want to make a difference come here and help so I did I didn't know that you weren't supposed to respond so so I went you know and fortunately I got recruited into what was the Bureau of the Budget in 19 January of 1967 because President Johnson at the time called in the director of the Bureau of the Budget and said to Charlie Schultz-Charlie I really like what Bob McNamara is doing at the Defense Department with cost-benefit analysis and program planning and budgeting and I want you to bring those ideas to the domestic activities of the government and so Charlie set out to hire some people with backgrounds in economics and operations research and and I was one of those people that got recruited to come and help install the McNamara ideas in the domestic part of government so in a parallel track President Ford served 25 years in the Congress and he was on the he was there 25 years served 23 years on the Appropriations Committee and he was fascinated by the appropriations process because it gave him a way to relate how we were spending our money on different things and he became arguably the best educated programmatic expert about government that we've had for President Harry Truman had some similar claims because of his time in the Congress but a lot of young people especially do not understand what a thoughtful knowledgeable person President Ford was about everything the government was doing and so when he was still Vice President I never forget he called me in and said he wanted me to explain the economics of clover leafs on interstate highway systems and what kind of businesses would be attracted and what would happen to property values that's how his mind worked he was he was not an idle kind of observer of what was going on he was into the details and he wanted to understand the facts of what programs work why they work which ones didn't work and so when he became president and asked me to be the deputy director of OMB you know in that 29 months I must have spent 300 hours sitting at the corner of his desk talking with him others present that's whatever their specialties were discussing how to allocate resources against all the competing needs in the federal government and you know I never forget one night about 10 o'clock after we've been at it for what seemed like forever there was a line I'll never forget $15 million increase for retired military pay and he said to me Paul why is this $15 million here and I said you know Mr. President I don't remember and he loved the fact I didn't know the answer to a question because I thought it was my God-given duty know the answer to every question he could ask before he could think to ask it he never let me forget the $15 million retired military budget increase that I didn't remember we changed the assumption about actuarial things and that's what produced the $15 million but he was unbelievably interested in the details and the depth and you know I said in the case when I was at the Ford School he would be appalled to hear people talking about deciding what percent of GDP we ought to spend on national defense because he knew how many people we needed in each of the uniform services from an analysis of threats and working with Dr. Kissinger and his own accumulation of knowledge over time he knew how many aircraft we needed he knew how much money we ought to spend on investments and new technology a lot of the technology we have now the stealth bombers they came out of his administration's investment and research and development and he understood at the same time that money we spent on national security issues was money we couldn't spend on other important public policy needs so he weighed all those things really carefully I tell you it was the greatest experience to work with someone so clear-headed and devoted to the country and to doing the right thing and you know I never ever in the time I spent with President Ford saw him diminish another human being by his word or by his action he was an uplifter of people you know just a fabulous wonderful person and I take personal pride in the fact that the school is now the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy because I honestly think it is the most meaningful lasting recognition of his life because young people hopefully will carry his values forward from the training they get at the Ford School at the University of Michigan so Henry we should talk about current affairs and I said to you earlier I'm sure this audience is knowledgeable about everything that's going on but I personally would like to hear your thoughts on the situation in Syria which is what you know I was thinking about this coming over maybe it's a function of getting old but it it used to be I think you could name the hotspots in the world where things were unraveling and there was civil unrest I think you have to have an excel spreadsheet now there are so many of them so Henry talk to us about Syria well that's a problem in Syria that's the problem of the United States and I put it that way because we have great difficulty understanding societies like the Syrian society and we have great problems as a country of understanding the relationship between diplomacy and power and democracy and therefore if I taught a course on policy making I always would say you begin with an analysis you have to begin explaining where you are and then you have to follow it with objectives what are you where are you and what are you trying to do and then you have of course to discuss the means but we have had great trouble about Syria in this sense when we see Syria on a map we say okay it's a country it has these borders uh first of all Syria is not a historic state it was created in its present shape in 1920 and it was given that shape in order to facilitate the control of the country by France which happened to be half the UN mandate the neighboring country Iraq was also given an art shape that was to facilitate control by England and the shape of both of the countries was designed to make it hard for either of them to dominate the region so you start with that not dealing with the United States it has a founding father and along it's secondly it's a country that is divided into many ethnic groups a multiplicity of ethnic groups and that means that it is very you can't an election doesn't give you the same results as the United States because every ethnic group votes for its own people so so you're right back to where you started you don't get a national consensus more over these ethnic groups very antagonistic to each other uh so you have Kurds, Druzes, Alawites, Sunnis, but about 10 to 12 Christians ethnic groups and they've been governed for the last 20 years by the Alawite minority which is about 13 percent but most of the army or much of the army is Alawite because Alawites were in the poor region and therefore joining the army was a way of coming up in the world so even they had only 13 percent of the population they had 80 percent of the army you don't understand what's going on and you understand that in addition most of the other minorities supported the Alawites only because they were afraid of the Sunnis not because they like the Alawites and the Assats are of course an Alawite military family uh for the current Assad who is there one can have this degree of sympathy he started out in life as an ophthalmologist the height of his ambition was to practice ophthalmology he didn't want to govern in Syria he was in in London for four years with his wife practicing his profession when his brother who was supposed to succeed the father was killed in an automobile accident and he was brought back to Syria so he's described in our media as the bad guy and that's largely true but he's also incompetent and unsuited for that office on on those grounds because you have to assume if you make ophthalmology your profession this is not that you're driven by a huge hunger for power so uh uh so then uh the revolution breaks out and uh in the American press it's described as a conflict between democracy and a dictator and the dictator is killing his own people and we've got to punish him but that's not what's going on uh it may have been started by a few democrats but on the whole it is an ethnic and sectarian conflict and one has to add another thing the Alawites are Shiites and uh so that's enmeshed in the historic Shiite Sunni conflict so however it started and whatever happened in the first three weeks it is now a civil war between sectarian groups and I have to say we have misunderstood it from the beginning if you need our media they say we've got to get rid of Assad and if we get rid of Assad then we form a coalition government uh inconceivable I mean I'm all in favor of getting rid of Assad uh but uh the dispute between us and the Russians on that issue was that the Russians say uh you start with getting rid of not just Assad that's not the issue but you break up the state administration and you'll wind up like in Iraq uh that there is nothing to hold hold it together and then you'll have an even worse civil war so this is how that mess has taken uh the present form there's three possible outcomes an Assad victory a Sunni victory or an outcome in which the various nationalities agree to coexist together but in more or less autonomous regions so that they can't oppress each other uh that's the outcome I would prefer to see uh and that's the one uh but that's not the popular view uh I don't see the if you put either of these sectarian groups in charge there'll be a bloodbath uh while and the so if one wants a humane outcome I also think Assad ought to go but I don't think it's the key the key is it's like Europe after the 30 years war uh when the various Christian uh groups had been killing each other until they finally decided that they had to live together but in in separate units so that it's the fundamental issue and we're beginning to move towards that uh but it's going to be very tough on top of it it's the fact that the Iranian problem uh the Iranians are half there half a quasi-terrorist I would say terrorist force in Lebanon uh which is Shiite they have now intervened on the uh on the al-Avide namely Shiite side uh but I don't and then you have a Kurdish unit in the north that wants to break off it is a really tough issue uh and uh I think we're now beginning to head uh towards uh a conference but what is almost inconceivable to me is that you can form a national coalition government where they then govern together and have their writ run through the whole country uh what will probably happen is that uh uh that the country will lose its unitary character that has also problems uh because it may risk that one of these units gets captured by terrorists and the terrorists are already very active uh they head fuller on the Shiite side and various al-Qaeda groups uh so that's an inscription uh of the situation what the United States can do now I think we're trying to head it in the direction that I described but we have to define an outcome nobody knows what we really want that can be achieved and so until we do that and then line up some other countries with us it's going to be very amorphous so Henry let me do a follow-up question with you when you look around the world and you see North Korea and you see China which you've written a lot about if you haven't read the China book it's worth it's worth the effort so we have Iran we have Iraq we have Afghanistan we have Syria you know it's interesting we have civil unrest in in Brazil we have civil unrest in Greece and and and the problems exist in different places for different reasons but my question to you is this is is there something that you would prescribe that we need to do as a nation to better live in this world of what seems like increasing instability are there different approaches we could take in our foreign policy and our economic policy that would would promise more hope for the coming generation an answer to the question in a minute I want to pick out of the list of topics you mentioned one about which I'm beginning to be a little optimistic which is the least probable namely North Korea that is probably the worst regime that exists anywhere in the world the most brutal the most exploitative they every house has a radio which they can't shut off so that the government can talk to them 24 hours a day and they have impoverished their people and submitted them to starvation or to get nuclear weapons and I think now we in China are coming together on that nuclear issue with North Korea and if that happens then we may see an evolution that will make it very tough for that regime to continue as it is but the fundamental question you asked is there's so much turmoil in the world what's the reason well this is the first period in history where every part of the world affects every other part and where they can watch it being affected so therefore events have a tendency of multiplying in a way that wasn't conceivable before the roman empire which was a great empire and the chinese empire existed in almost total ignorance of each other they knew there was something there but they had next to no contact and this went on until the beginning of the 19th century then the europeans took over the world as a colonial system but this is the first time now that you have different parts of the world with their own identity acting in a way that others with their identity have to react to so that's as a multiplier effect built into it secondly the nature of the modern communication system facilitates the coming together of groups that share nothing except their resentments so that creates a quest for excitement and for not looking for solutions but looking for some event and for some fulfillment so you now have non-state actors like these terrorist groups but also others that have tremendous impact in their society so that governments get preoccupied with dealing with these groups then have an issue that i personally believe but new generation will probably resent i think that the way that the people who are educated by the internet have a different mind than the others because they can get their information in bits and pieces they don't have to reflect about it in the traditional way uh so when you look at the leaders that emerge all over the world they're hugely sensitive to public opinion even when they are dictators they take constant polls then you have societies take china now they're going to move 400 million people from the countryside into the cities first that's a huge technological infrastructure problem but secondly if history teaches anything it is that when peasants leave the countryside and move into apartment houses and into cities they change their values from the countryside values to city values but how can any government know ahead of time which direction that takes and now you see all of this evolution you mentioned brazil uh what also seems to be happening is when you look at the per capita income uh when these development projects start they're mostly about infrastructure that's big and you can have huge programs but once you get per capita income above 6000 you have a lot of little uh uh enterprises which are uncontrollable by total planning i was meeting with a group the other day about china and we always read about the soe's uh government supported and sponsored enterprises to my amazement it emerged that there are only 400 of those that are run by the government by the central government and 123 000 that are run by local government cities provinces that produces automatically uh now in states that are less disciplined so so you have a lot of turmoil uh around the world but on the positive side of course mankind has never had such a tremendous explosion of relatively good being as you have now henry i think they want us to uh see if we can take a few questions from the audience so i wonder if we could uh do that now do we have yes today president obama was in berlin and discussing the uh potential to shut down and i'd like to know what both of your thoughts are and where you think we might best uh serve moving those presidents uh i have not my basic instincts i have not sorry to do because when i see pictures of god dhanamo i'm not thrilled by uh on the other hand here we have usually in a war you take prisoners and you return them when the war ends this is a war that doesn't see that doesn't end and we have found that maybe 70 percent of the prisoners we have released have come back to terrorist activities uh so you've got to put them somewhere uh and when the president was considering uh closing it right away they were exploring various state prisons federal prisons nobody wanted them no state wanted them and you'd have colossal other problems if you help people uh no of course if they're mistakes made then it's a tragedy but the criticism isn't uh mistakes usually almost invariably uh these are people connected with with terrorist activities so i'd prefer another solution uh but if nobody can come up with another solution i'd rather keep it then then apologize and turn them all loose again okay and when you were uh in the nixon administration and uh the opening to china occurred in striking way under a president who was perceived as anti-china anti-communist perception was what happened nothing like that would ever happen and reminisce with us a bit about how that came about the opening and initial progress that's good china and then if you could give a review of the role of china in the modern world now please announce a big question in terms of the future of china it's in the global geopolitical scene well uh nixon was an anti-communist ideologically but he was also a great patriot and he looked at the international situation from the point of view of what does the country need now when he took over the country had been for four and a half years in the vietnam war it had already suffered 35,000 casualties and he thought his job was on the one hand to bring the war to an end but on the other to give the american people a positive vision of the world other than just ending a war and he concluded uh that here were 800 that i'm china had 800 million people that were not part of the world anymore and that it was essential to bring them into the international system so he made that decision fairly very early in his term uh but we didn't know how to do it at first because the chinese were in the middle of the cultural revolution and they had called all their diplomats back uh there was only one embassy in europe in warsaw where we occasionally had uh had contact with them so the first problem we had was how do you reach the top level chinese uh we thought at first we'd go to the most independent minded communists we knew which were the romanians who had been hostile to to pressure so we went to the romanians and uh they did send messages but the chinese didn't trust any communists even though they were the gels but they didn't trust any communists that was related to muskau so i won't go through all the highways we had to go we finally uh went to the pakistanis who we knew had relations with them and we sent a message via the pakistanis that we wanted to talk and up to that point they had been a contact in warsaw at which they had been 167 meetings distinguished by the fact that they had made no progress whatsoever because each side raised all kinds of technical problems the thing for which the nixon administration deserves special credit is that they say let's scrub all these we want to discuss the basic uh relationship uh so we exchanged and the way we exchanged messages was like from a spy story uh we are used to mess to texting uh in those days they wrote out their messages to us by hand and delivered them in pakistan and pakistan then sent a messenger or envoy over with the message we answered typed on unmarked unsigned unadressed paper so if the chinese showed it we could deny it and uh so this went on for nearly uh for nearly three years until we came together and uh i was sent to uh to Beijing as the envoy of the president and i was sitting there for 40 hours without any communication and you know i could have finished the nixon presidency uh if i screwed up uh but there was one maybe amusing uh aspect to this uh every visitor going to china would if was dying to see mal my problem was the opposite uh i knew that nixon wanted to be the first person to meet mal and so i find myself in Beijing and we now know from the records that mal had given instructions that the minute i asked to see him i should be brought to him uh and he didn't want to be in a position of asking me to see him so he had given those instructions but i never asked so i must be the first person who went to Beijing refusing so i saw jo and li as my major i see person i dealt with until after the nixon visit after that i met uh mal uh five times so it was a very convoluted process but our basic conviction was you cannot have peace in the world if a large percentage of the human population is not exchanging ideas with the other and if you look at the records of our conversations uh the first four or five meetings that i conducted there sound like college professors exchanging views about history because we had decided that let's put all the technical issues aside for the room you know claims and assets and all that the issues that divided we spent i spent most of my time saying here is what we think about foreign policy and about the world and i made an effort to give him a very accurate account so that if something happened on a day to day basis they had a basis for comparison and as it turned out we were lucky the jo and li also did the same thing and what it shows is if you ask me the basic principle of negotiation should be not to haggle about what causes the disagreement but to make sure that each side understands where the other one comes from because then they can i don't know whether you'd agree with that in business but uh what i've learned from that i usually begin a negotiation by telling the opposite number what i want to achieve and why because then it certainly is in the chinese case turned out to be the right approach so um dr kissinger you haven't talked about the iranian nuclear program yet i see that as one of the biggest issues we've got to deal with what should we do and what do you think's going to happen the huge issue first we have said now together with five other permanent members of the security council for 15 years that this is unacceptable and for 15 years we have said that uh no method is off the table now if suddenly they emerge with nuclear weapons our position would be very very difficult secondly if iran the process of nuclear proliferation much stuff because if it continues uh when i think of what was required in a two-power nuclear world in terms of warning system safety system protecting commanding control to prevent the war and then you imagine 50 countries maneuvering simultaneously without the technology uh it's almost guaranteed that that a nuclear war somewhere will start which could produce hundreds of thousands of casualties uh in hours uh when you look at my 11 it discompopulated us but there were only 3000 dead no wounded no damage to infrastructure uh it was bad enough so this is one thing secondly iran is right now supporting uh many terrorist groups all over the world uh if they now and top of it have nuclear weapons and feel protected uh so it they have already proclaimed that they want to exterminate uh uh israel but i would urge those of you who want to understand how she i theologians think uh they really believe they are fulfilled i'm not saying they want to die in a nuclear war but they have fewer restraints than uh most others so i think keeping uh if if iran moves to its nuclear weapons it's very probable that israel will attack or very likely uh uh so so what happened uh i would say we are in the last year where you can still say a negotiation can conceivably succeed because with every year they're accumulating more and more visible material uh but every year it becomes harder to see whether they're building uh uh nuclear warheads and most scientists believe that if i don't know six months nine months if they keep accumulating visible material it will be almost impossible to trace it back uh so we will see what happens now but if nothing happens the president will have to make some really tough decisions but we cannot want to be in another war but we cannot want them to have nuclear weapons either do you have any thoughts on the deadlock in congress oh you know when i was in government i thought life was rough but in those days you still had committee chairman don't you think paul three or four times a year you could go to them and say look this is not a partisan issue the country needs it and i would say 60 to 70 percent of the time you could have a bipartisan outcome that doesn't seem to be happening now and uh uh i don't know theoretically you would like a more bipartisan approach but the wake there's a number of aspects the wake campaigns are now conducted people need so much money that they get financed more by pressure groups in the house which has 432 seats maybe 50 of them are contested all the others are so completely in the hands of one party i've seen statistics i may be wrong about when ford ran for the presidency i think over 20 states were considered contested now it's six to eight all the others so that then puts tremendous uh emphasis on divisiveness in those states where you're trying to move the few i don't know what the answer is it's deeply concerning so i i i'm gonna have the final word henry i i think the answer is we're one great leader away from regaining our balance so what do i mean by that you know our system if you go back to the time we spent together in the government a richard nixon a republican created the environmental protection agency the osha for worker safety reopened reopened our country to china proposed the first negative income tax for you young people you probably don't know what that means but it was uh an unbelievably progressive idea in the late 1960s and early 1970s and if wilbur melton was then the chairman of the houseways and means committee hadn't decided he wanted to run for president we probably would have gotten rid of a whole lot of things that still persist and have a clean straightforward simple way to provide economics assistance to low income people you know so i think where we are is largely a function of leadership or or not leadership uh there's god knows there are things we need to do so i end on that note on a public policy note that was one of the reasons i got fired you know it was clear to me and has been for a long time we need fundamental tax reform in our country so i'll tell you a few facts right right now our tax system is such a mess in the way it's designed that is significantly unenforceable and so by best estimates we're under collecting taxes that in theory are due and owing to the tune of four hundred billion dollars a year and it cost us some place between three and four hundred billion dollars a year on a total economic impact basis to our people to administer this tax system so do you think we're smart enough to engineer a tax system that collects the money we need in a clear straightforward simple fair way that collects the money we need to pay for agreed public purposes without a seven hundred billion dollar hole i personally believe it's a really significant issue in not just an economic efficiency but i think if you look at societies that unravel or have difficulty going forward you know a significant reason is because the people are really not attached to their government so if you look at some european countries that have fallen on hard times you know the national sport is tax avoidance or evasion and so at that most fundamental level of connection where we're all somehow connected to the fabric of government we've got you know what what i believe is proof positive uh that we deal with every way every day in our tax system that we're not an intelligent people because intelligent people wouldn't have the system so henry would you like to end with some humor you have a wonderful sense of humor henry is i tell you what if you don't know about henry's humorous quotes you need to go on google and read about power but this it's like uh an event that occurred to me once where a lady came up to me at the reception and and said i understand you're a fascinating man she said fascinate me so uh well sir i think it is fair to say that your candor and your insights have certainly fascinated all of us and so i would like to uh before i again thank our very special guests this evening i'd like to thank all of you for joining us here we have been delighted to have you join us but it is a special pleasure to again thank dr kissinger and mr o'neill for their candid insights we clearly face a huge number of policy challenges in so many arenas and i think this conversation has elucidated them in a number of very important ways we very much appreciate you sharing generously your perspectives and your insights so please join me in again thanking our very special guests