 and welcome to the Runlet and Baldachi Report. In the 20 plus years that I've been at this station, I've had a bucket list of people that I've wanted to interview on this station. The number one on that bucket list, and number two will be accomplished as of today. Number one was George Mitchell, a friend of mine, a Bowdoin College graduate, and easily one of the greatest public servants in the history of Maine and also the history of the United States. The second person is a man that I also became friends with, and when I saw him play against the University of Maine in 1962, I said to myself, I think this guy's gonna be great. Little did I know that within a decade, he would walk across 600 miles in the Northern District to be elected Congress to the Congress of the United States, and then in that same year, very close, become on the cover of Time Magazine as one of the foremost people in the Watergate issue. I am so pleased to have him, and Rob, you know him even longer than I do, pleased to the honor of introducing our guest. Thank you, Derry. It's a pleasure to introduce a fellow Bangor native who I've known a long, long time, and his mother and father were a part of our family growing up. Secretary of Defense, former Secretary of Defense, William S. Cohen, or Billy as we've known him. Bill as we know it. Bill from Bowdoin College. Go ahead, Rob, your first question of our guest. Yeah, Billy, just as a fellow Bangor native, talk a little bit about your childhood growing up, Bill, because I think it's important for people to get a sense of your roots, and I know how important they are to you, growing up, serving on the council, along with my father and so many others and making such an impact, and then from there, the rest is history. But talk a little bit about your growing up in our great city, Bangor, Maine. Bob, thank you for your kind words and going back to my roots in Bangor. I was born on the third story of a tenement building on Hancock Street, and Hancock Street was a street filled with immigrants. And if you just look at the names along that street, you would find, obviously, you'd find Cohen, you'd find Caruso, you'd find Gottlieb, you would find Maksimek, there'd be Greek, Syrian, Jewish, Polish, Greek, as I said, Greek and I'm finding Irish as well, but down the line, they were all families who came from other countries. And so I grew up on that street the first eight years of my life. And then after the war was over, my dad was able to expand his little operation and we moved exactly one mile from 278 Hancock Street up to East Summit Street, exactly one mile to the point. And I moved from kind of lower class economically to lower middle class in that one mile. But always it was a sense that I was part of a community that to me seemed large. When you talk about large cities, Bangor being the third largest city in Maine, with population of about 36, 37,000, it tells you we were all pretty small in terms of pretty close. Everybody knew just about everybody else. And that was a great thing to grow up in a city like Bangor, Maine, and to have the friendships that lasted over the years has just been an amazing part of my life. A big part of it was my father and my dad was a baker who worked 18 hours a day, six days a week, slept about three and a half hours a night and loved his work. Making bagels, didn't he? Didn't he make bagels? He called them bulky rolls. And bomber rolls. The bagels are a very different type of... Only bagel. But he made bulky rolls and rye bread. And one of the joys as a young boy is I used to help carry these bags in my arms to the Baltachi restaurant, which was then called Baltimore restaurant. Still more, yes, that's correct. Located under the... Another bridge. On the Brewer Bridge, Bangor Brewer Bridge. And it was the place that all the good folks tended to gather. They had spaghetti and meatballs and Ruby Cohen's bulky rolls. And occasionally you see some beer drinking take place there as well. But I loved to go in there. And my dad loved to engage in conversation, challenge the Baltachi family. He loved picking in an intellectual fight with them, so to speak, on good humor. And it just, it was a great family. The Baltachi family and the Collin family, we were from the beginning, I think, from three or four years old, and growing up in the city of Bangor, knowing the Baltachi family. Well, Bill, I have to say to you that if you are what you eat in high school, I would have been either a pats pizza or a Baltachi spaghetti from the Baltimore. And I'm gonna jump ahead now, Bill. We'll go back and forth, but I wanna ask you about 1992. It's 1992 and Bill Clinton has just been elected president of the United States. Where were you and what were you thinking about when the call came in or whatever it was that said, guess what, I'm capping you for secretary of defense. Do you remember that moment? I do. Well, it was 1996, actually. 1996, excuse me, right, yes, of course. Six, and I had announced my retirement from the Senate. I had spent 18 years in the Senate, another six and a half. So a quarter of a century I felt was long enough for me. I wanted to start a different aspect of my life. And so I had just purchased and I had an option, assigned an option to rent an office in downtown Washington to start the Cohen Group. And that was in October of 96. And I got a call from after the election was over. I had a call from the White House, so to speak. And they said, would you like to come down and have lunch with the president? And I said, yeah, of course. I didn't know him really, I didn't vote with him. And maybe I shook hands with him five or six times during the course of four years of various functions, but we were not friends. And so I was like, sure, I'd love to come to the White House and have a chance to have lunch with the President Clinton. Anyway, we met and it was a conversation that was more philosophical in nature. We weren't talking about politics. He just wanted to get to know me a bit. And so it was nice, it lasted about an hour, I left. And then I ended up in a few days flying to Bangkok in Thailand. I was giving a speech to the US Thai Business Council. Turns out that President Clinton was over there to attend the birthday of the king. He was up on a podium. I was in the audience attending the king's birthday. And I had a tie on, a yellow tie, and it had white elephants on it. It was a, quote, Jim Thompson tie, big silk manufacturer in that part of the world. And President Clinton came off the podium and he spotted me, said, by the way, are those a Republican elephants or are they Thai elephants? Very quick on my feet, Mr. President, they're Thai elephants in there. He went back to Washington. I went on to Malaysia and then came back a couple of days later. And I had another call, what I would like to come down and see President again. So I did, and this time was much more specific. And we had a conversation that was something like this. Asking me about NATO, what I thought about the world, where they think about how the defense department played in that world, et cetera. And then he said, if I were to ask you to be my secretary of defense, what would you say? I said, Mr. President, if you were to ask me and I were to accept, I would have to have these two understandings with you. Number one, if I accepted, you would never have to worry about me going behind your back or that of the cabinet or the administration to tell my friends on the health side, do you know what these guys are really thinking of down here? Because I was part of the opposition party that had been done before to have a political figure and elected official of a different party and a different administration, especially for position like secretary of defense. So I said, I will be absolutely dedicate myself to helping you achieve your goals, provided it's consistent with my own values. If I think something is antithetical to my true beliefs, I will resign. And he said, okay. And I said, now, that's my promise to you that I'll be dedicated to your program. And I said, but you got to give me a promise and you have to promise me that you'll never involve me in any political discussion in the White House or elsewhere. Let me go to the defense department, do what I think I can do to help you in that capacity, but never ask me to come over and never ask me to participate in the political discussion. And he said, you got it. So sometime went by and I was told one day I expect a call tomorrow at eight o'clock. And so I said, okay. And eight o'clock came the next day, no phone call. I was living on Pennsylvania Avenue with Janet, my wife. And I said, I'm gonna take our dog Lucky out for a walk. She said, well, the wife's gonna call you. I said, they really want me, they'll call back. That was pretty arrogant of me to say that, by the way. But nonetheless, I took our dog out. We spent about a half hour walking. Sure enough, I came back into the apartment and Janet said, the White House call. I said, okay, I'll call back. So I called back and I said, a very short conversation. He said, I want you to be second deaf. I said, I agree based on the two promises we made. And then we hung up, that was it. And Janet turned to me, she said, what promises did you make? So then I advised her the conditions under which I wanted to serve or would serve. And after you took that position, Bill, which was a huge honor, I know that Janet was very much a part of, you and your wife were really a strong partnership representing the United States and the Defense Department all around the world. And I know she was right there with you. I just wanna say, Bill, that I was a government major at Bowdoin College and I wanna say to the audience, folks, you have to understand that in American history, a sitting president picking somebody from the other party to be a cabinet member in which many people considered to be the most important cabinet post in the day and age, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State being right up there. It is very uncommon for a president to pick someone in the opposite party and for a promise, like Bill just talked about, to have been made by two people. Rob, your next question. Yeah, I'd like to go back a little bit, Bill, and I just wanna mention your dad and your mom, obviously, but your dad was such a factor of influence and I know your life, but he was such a great friend, your family with our family. And I remember when you were in the Senate and my brother John tells his story, apparently from your dad that you weren't around, you were in Bangor at the time. I don't know if you were Secretary of Defense or you were on the Senate Intelligence Committee, but the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee calls the Bangor Rai and talks to your dad and so he introduced himself as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. I'm looking for Senator Cohen. Is he around? And your dad, and God bless him, said, well, if you're the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, you ought to know where my son is. So, but that's just, his humor was, just his humor was priceless. We loved him, Bill, we loved him. I remember he would go into Mama Bolzachi's because you went from the Baltimore to one. That's correct. And he would go in when I went out on weekends with him and they would have a table ready and the colic we would start, he would say the words, in fact, do you talk about alimony? No, it's all the money. He's the one who engaged in the repartee with everybody at the restaurant. So, it was wonderful. Bill, Senate, the House Watergate Committee, when you were serving with the leader of your party, facing potential impeachment, what must have, what was that like for you as a member of the president's party sitting there and voting ultimately for an impeachment, which didn't take place? Freshman congressman. Freshman congressman from Bangor, Maine, staring down the leader of your party, the president of the United States. And I asked that question in relation to what's going on now. But anyway, what was going through your head at that point in time, Bill? Well, I was a lawyer by training and I had a reverence for the rule of law. And if there's one thing I thought our party, it's obviously both parties too, but the Republican party always said, we believe in the law and order, the rule of law. And so I felt that's exactly what my job was is to listen to what had taken place, listen to the evidence, listen to the tape recordings by Jed for hours and then come to a conclusion where their impeachable offenses committed. The pressure was on all of us to say, this is just a democratic plot to overthrow the election that was taking place. Nixon had won, I think, I think McIrvin had won only one state. So it was an overwhelming support for president Nixon. And they said the Democrats are allowed just to overturn that. And I said, well, why don't we listen to the facts? And then decide whether or not president Nixon engaged in conduct that we would find offensive to the constitution would amount to a high crime of misdemeanor. So first we had to define what that meant and then apply the facts as they unfolded to the definition of what a high crime misdemeanor was. So listening to that, to have a president engage in supporting perjury, paying hush money, raising funds to keep those who are going to jail or pay their lawyer fees and et cetera, that's simply with conduct that is unbecoming, was unbecoming of the president of the United States. But I have a very high standard for members of Congress to be sure, but the president of the United States is supposed to represent all of us. Aside from philosophical differences, he is the face of the country. And so I want the president of the United States to have a higher standard of conduct and not a lower one because he's president. And so I go back to my legal studies and training and had a justice who said something that you are a fiduciary. If you're an elected official or appointed official, you are a trustee, a fiduciary. And a fiduciary has morals that are higher than that of the marketplace. We demand the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive. So people should expect a higher level of conduct from those that they entrust, either their money or their lives and limbs to protect. And so that was a standard that I wanted to adhere to. It wasn't shared by most of my colleagues at the time. And so there was a lot of hate mail that came in, got death threats. And I was prepared not to come back because the many of the Republican party said, you're just loyal, we can't trust you. And we're gonna vote, you've got to vote of office. So I expected not to come back. And I was quite surprised that things turned around the last moment when they found one of the missing tapes. And then Republicans went down to the president said, no, we can't support you anymore. So it was a dirty uptime, but it was one, I just felt there was, you have to insist upon compliance with the law. If you don't have the rule of law, then you have the rule of the jungle. And the rule of the jungle simply power goes to those who have the most either physical or economic power. Bill, you back the right horse on that one. And we all know it, especially us lawyers that felt the same way you did. And I'm gonna cut right to the chase on this question. With what's going on today? I'm simply gonna ask you if you agree with me that this upcoming election is without question the most interesting election in the United States that's gonna be happening this presidential election. I just wanna ask you to comment. You can say whatever you wanna say about what's happening in this election when one of the candidates has been indicted, is being charged, is being in court right now, in a federal court and a state court. I'm just gonna ask you to comment about your feelings as to what's gonna happen or what you think may happen in this election and how you feel about the candidates. Good question. Well, on the one hand, you say it's the most interesting election coming up. I think it's one of the most existential elections coming up in terms of our democracy. I would say we're on the doomsday clock as far as Armageddon politically or from a democratic point of view, small D, we are 30 seconds away from that clock hitting midnight. And I say that because I've never been in a situation or seen a situation where a candidate who I believe is flawed, unethical, morally bankrupt and who engages in conduct that either he inspired or conspired with the attempt to overthrow the election that can be indicted for so many crimes still has the support of millions, 70, 80 million American people. That to me poses a question to us. Are we really in favor and support a democratic form of government or are we slipping to what I would call either the edge of tyranny or anarchy? The anarchy would come first and then the tyranny. So we have to really go to this election with the understanding that if we have Mr. Trump elected again, given his history, what he tried to do in the first term, if he is elected again, he will carry out a policy of vengeance and retribution, charging all of his political opponents with crimes and taking his vengeance out on those companies who do not support him and did not support him. And so you would see us slipping to a form of fascism, if I can put it that way, where the accumulation of power is based upon power and not upon principle and upon the threat of imprisonment or worse. So I think that we are very close to losing the very foundations of our country believing that we're all subject to the rule of law, that applies equally to everybody. And it doesn't, just because you're President of the United States doesn't mean it doesn't apply to you. Mr. Trump thinks it doesn't apply to him. So I think it's very dangerous where we are right now. I think it's very dangerous when my party is basically complicit in the Liars Club or establishing a Liars Club. Namely, you have to say that I don't believe that Joe Biden won this election. I think the election was stolen. If you don't say that, you're not welcome in the Republican party anymore. And so to me, it's a very dangerous time because we need a strong Republican party and we need one that's based upon the tradition of law and order, strong relations with other countries, strong defense, strong fiscal responsibility. Those principles really are the basis of our party. We're not talking about that now. All we're talking about is electing a man who wants to wreak vengeance upon those who have either criticized him, impeached him or tried to impeachment, impeach him. I just think that if we do that, we know what he's done before. We know what he is promising to do in the future. And if that's the future, I think we're undone as a major player in this world because other countries are watching us. They're watching us and they're making a judgment. Is this a country we really wanna follow in terms of its leadership? Yes, we've got a strong economy. Yes, it's free and open and capitalistic in nature, but here's a government which is only subject to the winds of one individual which does not believe in the rule of law, which will change policies overnight without hesitation which undercuts respect for every institution in our country, you think about it. He has tried to undermine the integrity of the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence community, even the military, keeping score upon individuals who've given their lives. He was in the Arlington National Cemetery standing there with General John Kelly, a four-star general who lost his son. And they were over the grave site and the president then turned around and said, what's in it for all of them? They gave their lives for what? And basically saying they're all suckers. John McCain, a loser. John McCain was my best friend. I could go on about that, but that's what we're talking about with the stake here. I want the president of the United States to look like and act like and revere that office and not turn it into some kind of a circus show. Amen to that. All I can say is I listened to George Mitchell answer a similar question. His thoughts and words, in my opinion, were gold. You just said it in so many words. I consider your impression also to be gold, Rob. With that said, Bill, what impact has social media had and creating this cult, this mega cult that is laughing in the face of our democracy? I mean, if you had Fox and Newsmax and all of these social media platforms back when you were serving on the Watergate Committee, do you think that the outcome might have been different? Would Nixon have played that Fox Tucker Carlson viewpoint that has influenced so many people in this country? What do you think, Mr. Secretary? I think he never would have been removed from office. I think social media has given a platform to people who remain anonymous to say anything that they want. It can be violent and is violent. It can be degrading. It can be threatening. It can set in motion activities which undermine our society. So I don't think we had social media at that time. I don't think Nixon would have been threatened with impeachment or have agreed to step down. So I think social media has changed things much, much for the better in some aspects. But I guess what troubles me, there's no filter anymore. When Senator Mitchell and I were in office, we could say, well, we have three major networks. We've got Uncle Walter Cronkite. We've got three major anchors in those three major networks. And we knew that the networks believed in trying to get the facts right and then get them out. Now we don't care about that. Social media doesn't care about facts at all. In fact, they want to have their own alternative facts, their own post-truth error, where you and I will not be able to distinguish what is true and what is false, what's real and what's memory. And so they're blending now and commingling truths and lies to the point where the people are not able to really distinguish, which is the real thing, which is real truth and which are lies masquerading as truth. Bill, I want to make some connections that during this interview and I want to lighten things up a little bit. I'm going to return to a few years ago when you signed your latest novel. And I went there with Bob Corey, whose wife, Jan, works for you and does your institute, which I'm going to ask about. But I remember, Bill, what I enjoyed about that meeting that day is you had our picture taken, which, by the way, was in my introduction to the Dairy Runlet Show, a picture of you and me. But anyway, you told me a story about Bowdoin beating the University of Maine in 1962 as I sat in the front row from Orano High School and watched you play that game. And I had forgotten a very important point about that game. Will you please tell that story about what happened to Bowdoin College and the University of Maine on the last game they ever played, 1962? It probably was the most memorable game of my life. There you go. The University of Maine had an undefeated record at that point. I think they went to the NIT that year, but they were unblemished. They were a great basketball team. And Bowdoin, we came down. I think we had seven players, maybe eight. We didn't have... You said seven, seven. So we took the floor with seven people warming up and the crowd looked down. I said, my God, this is going to be a disaster. And I had an unusual night that night and scored quite a few points beyond what I would normally do, I think. But we ended up defeating the University of Maine with a basketball team, I must say. We were not high on the list of those that we're seeing as being very accomplished. So it was a stunning moment. I think we had Wayne Champion was for the game that time. We had the two brothers from Old Town. Yes, and you had Skip Chappelle. Skip Chappelle. And Larry Shiner and the boys from Old Town, the Sturgeon Boys. And you were out there shooting a two-handed set shot from close to past the three-point line before they did the three-point line. And I watched you think about it. I don't know how many baskets, but you kept shooting that ball and they kept swishing in. I turned to my friends and I had forgotten you won. And I said, I think Bowdoin's going to win and you did. That's when I decided to go to Bowdoin. Thank you, Bowdoin. Well, I gotta tell you, you talked to my dad. My dad, I guess I got that two-handed shot from him because I used to watch him play when he was a young man and down at the YMCA and I would watch him shoot. So I guess I based it on that. But my father was a big influence on me in terms of basketball and again, striving for excellence. One time in a church league game, he was there watching me and I scored 43 points. Wow. And I hopped over to the sideline and I thought he was going to throw his arm around me and say, great game. And as I went over and looked at him, he said, you know, if you hadn't missed those two foul shots, you would have had 55. That sounds like really good. You could have done better. Go ahead, Rob. Would you break? This is how he lived his life. He was never satisfied with the roles he made. He always wanted to know, and we would drive down on a Jewish holiday, the FCI day he would take off, drive to Boston to find out why they're flour, the elements that go into the making of bread and the bulgur, why were theirs better? And so he would then drive back or right to work because he was on 18 hours a day. And so he's always trying to improve his product and his service. And he said, don't ever think that you've reached your peak. You can always do better. And just because you got 43, you could have had 45. And you've done all your life, Bill. Yes, you have. You weren't satisfied with Congress. You had to keep moving out. You would have been a great president. Go ahead. Amen to that too. Your dad obviously was very proud of you. Would he, would you allow him to watch you play basketball and at the Y or some of the games that you played, Billy? Because I know at one point you asked him not to come. Not to come? I did have to ask him not to come, not because of me, but because he would get up in the stands in the old Bangor Auto Tour. I mean, the really old one that people remember down by the Paul Bunyan statue. It was just so. I do. I remember it. Go ahead. So he would get up in the stands and try to hang back and he'd see me get out on the court. And he would yell out, go left, go right, shoot from here. And the players came to me and said, Billy, are you going to talk to your father? Our fathers aren't down here. Because what he would do is he would drop off his rolls and bread at Miller's restaurant, which right. And then he would swing by the auditorium to watch me play. So they said, our dad's idea. You got to ask him to stop. So I went to him. I said, I'm getting a lot of heat for this. So just don't come to the practices. And one time he said, okay, I won't. One time it's in the middle of winter. And I'm dribbling it on the court. I'm looking out and I see a figure in the window. And my father was standing on a railing, peering through the glass and it was snowing. And he had about four or five inches of snow on top of his hat. He was up there standing watching. And I never forgot that much. He wanted me to succeed and took such pride in what I was doing. So it was a moment that I've never forgotten. And I mean, I didn't acknowledge that I saw him, but my heart was kind of jumping at that time. Bill, I'm going to go back to a heavy question now. I'm sure you're very concerned as former secretary of defense about Putin, about Kim, John, about these dictators. How do you feel about both of those people? And if you can, some comments about Ukraine. Yeah, good. What do you feel about those particular individuals? Well, Kim Jong-un, he has a romance with a former president. President Putin was invited to participate in our elections back in 2016. I mean, if any other, excuse me, president were to invite Vladimir Putin to participate in our election system, they'd be voted out of office, excuse me. So he's got a friend in Putin. He's got a friend, a romance going with Kim Jong-un, who did. These are the two most brutal dictators on the world scene at this moment. Sorry, let me take a quick. Yes. So they both now, well, of course, Russia has armed with nuclear weapons. North Korea is also armed with nuclear weapons. And so they present a threat to the world in terms of ever using nuclear weapons and can set off a chain reaction in that fashion. I don't know that we can do much about it other than continuing to have a very strong deterrent. And that means keeping up with our capability to inflict a similar type of pain and suffering upon either Russia, North Korea, or any other country that would pose a threat to us. So we're on this balance of power, balance of terror. I mean, we live, if you think about it, we live on the edge of a hair trigger of existential, I'd say, yeah, an existential threat to global stability, security, and existence. And so it'd be called an extinction level event should they start using nuclear weapons. So what we have to do is be able to deter that. You deter it by having a capability to say don't do this because it's coming back at you. You have to try to defend against it. Very hard to defend because the weapons systems are getting faster, the missiles are getting faster, hypersonic missiles, et cetera. So it gets tougher to defend against that, but we still have to try. And then you have to have the capability of responding. And so it's deter, defend, and then defeat. Those are the three kind of words that we were using at the Pentagon. It's more difficult now. You have obviously China. China is a nuclear power as well as a global economic power. I would put them at the level of being a peer competitor of the United States. Others put them behind us. But when I look at what they've been able to do, I would put them as a peer competitor. And we have to be very careful that we, they and we don't engage in any kind of a nuclear exchange. So I would say we're living in a dangerous time. And the best thing we can do is make sure that we are strong. That means we have to be economically strong to afford to be able to match or exceed their capabilities. We have to be diplomatically engaged and we have to be able to rally our allies. And this is where I really am upset with our Republican, my Republican friends, if there are any left in the Congress. And that is that we are now trying to pull aid away from Ukraine. Now, the Republican party, we like to think that, you raise that flag, it means freedom. It means our freedom, but our freedom depends upon the freedom of other countries who work with us, our allies. And here you have Ukraine that is fighting for their lives, suffering massive casualties, horrific casualties. And you have members of Congress that say, no, we don't think we want to help them anymore. And that means Putin will just roll over them. Putin then changes the geography of Europe and places all of our European allies and greater jeopardy. And then that sends a signal over to the Chinese who are now looking at Taiwan. And they say, well, you really can't count on the United States. Putin made a calculation from the very beginning that the United States would fold over time that we in a democratic society would not stand behind and support Ukrainians for the long term. So here we are, it looks like that he was right, that you now have elements of the Republic who are not the major part of it, but elements in the House especially of saying, pull the funding out. I think it's shameful. I think it will destroy our reputation in much of the world saying, all you have to do is wait out the United States because they don't, they can't hang in there as a democratic society. Bill, what do you feel is the greatest threat facing our country today? Is it threats from within or the threats that you just talked about? Good question. The greatest threat that we face today. I think it's us. I think it's us. I agree. I think, you know, democracies historically don't live long lives. They live short, happy lives. And then because you have a democratic form of freedom of action, of thought and speech and which people can argue in that argument then leads to lack of action, dysfunctionality. And so the history of democracies is not one of stranger victories. So we have this noble experiment. It's been amazing to see how we started, how far we've come, the potential we have, but we can really do it if we're united. All the big issues, we obviously are gonna differ on democratic philosophy, Republican philosophy. That's part of who we are. But now it's gotten to the point where bipartisanship is seen as dancing with the devil. We're dining with the devil. And people who are seen as crossing over and trying to reach out and bring a consensus together. We're talking about Senator Mitchell before. Senator Mitchell and Senator Bob Dole couldn't be more opposite in terms of philosophy and in terms of governance issues. And yet they trusted each other, they worked together, they respected each other and they made the system work. Right now it's a form of warfare which is now getting so negative, so degrading. It's so almost pornographic in terms of the language that's used about our political opponents on that it throws into a real question here whether we are so committed to our declared virtues and values or are we just whispering them and we really want power at any cost. And so it's a big issue coming up. And so I would say the biggest threat to us is Pogo. It's us because if we're united, there are no other country in the world that has the capabilities that we do, the natural resources, the ability to innovate, create and execute these programs. So we have the great potential, the ability and we are watching it simply grind to a halt as if we're pouring cement into the gears of the government and to see if we can stop it, shut the government down. Think about that. It has now been taught about shutting the government down as a normal thing. This is not normal behavior. Government's not supposed to shut down. Government's not there to serve the people. And if you shut it down, you're gonna inflict hardship on millions of people, including our military, including our veterans, including our civil servants, including social security recipients, Medicare and stuff. And they say, well, we'll work it out. A little pain won't be too bad. I'll take it. Thank you, Bill. Bill, number one, George Mitchell also talked about his friendship with Bob Dole. Number two, just this afternoon before I came here, I was talking to my niece about this government shutdown stuff. And I said, this panic, this fear that they put on the Today Show, oh my God, we're gonna shut the government down. It's just not right, but I'm gonna switch gears a little bit here. This book that you wrote with your wife, one of the best books that could be written about. Excellent. Race Relations and your Poetry's in here. I just love every part of it. And Liz Armstrong and Francie Tolum from Bowdoin College gave me this book after we interviewed George Mitchell without knowing that you were our next interview. I couldn't believe that they did that by coincidence. What I wanna ask you is this, this book that you wrote, Love in Black and White, can we agree that certain politicians running for the presidency of the United States have taken race relations and set them back about 100 years? This whole thing about changing the topics in school is about slavery being not so bad or whatever. Please comment on your feelings about the hot, hotwarming aspect of this book and what's happening in the country today with race relations. Well, you know, race or racism has been central to our existence from the very beginning. Slavery really was an institution that helped drive the economy. The submission of human beings to enslavement was a horrible existence or a certain experience for us. And it took years in order to abolish it, but then you had sort of an illegitimate son called Jim Crow. And then after Jim Crow, you had segregation and then you had to have marches on Washington to say, we are human beings. We deserve the statement over the Supreme Court, equal justice under law. And it was just not, go ahead. Never been granted. And so the race issue has always been drawn out during presidential elections. You cannot go back to an election in which race, blaming other people, especially those of color. Now my wife had an extraordinary relation to her relationship experience. She is a daughter of a single parent mother. She grew up in basically a ghetto. At one point in her life, she and her mother had to live with 26 other people who are all religious. She went on to become a model TV personality. She was, Dr. King was her mentor and she traveled with Dr. King for two years, the last two years of his life. She was dating Muhammad Ali, who was a friend, she was tied into the whole civil rights movement. She was living with Mahalia Jackson until she found her own place. So she was part of that group that said, hey, we've always been able to do these things. It's always said that black people have come a long way. No, she would point out, it's the white people who come a long way because you may remember black people as athletes were said, well, they're probably strong and they are fast, but they're not very smart. And they said they could never be a pitcher. Well, guess what, they could never be quarterbacks. Well, guess what, who are the quarterbacks today? Every time they've had an opportunity to compete at the same level and given the same education, they compete well. But so race has always been with us and it's with us now. Trump is exploiting us, he does every time. And we have to try to be better and to do better. But I think race has always been with us. It's getting better. Janet was given the honorary doctorate at Bowdoin College based upon her play, Anne and Emmett, which was imaginary conversation between two of our historic martyrs as such, Anne Frank and Emmett Till. So she was pointing out, yeah, you have anti-Semitism and racism, they're still with us. And so what we have to do is try to not ban books, not ban the history. I mean, if you eliminate history, if you twist history, if you tell a different history, then our students will never know what the facts are so that we can build upon the facts of the past and make us better in the future. So people who want to shape the future are trying to eliminate the past so that those young people coming up won't know the history of slavery, why we had it. Did we have it? Why did we have Jim Crow? Why did we have segregation? It can be one other example. Think about this, until a year or so ago, I guess about a year and a half, the National Football League had a standard for black athletes that didn't apply to white athletes. In other words, if the black athletes suffered concussions or any kind of mental impairment, they had a higher burden of proof to show that their injuries were inflicted by football than the white athletes did because they said black athletes were at a lower cognitive level. That is a rule that lasted for 100 years in the NFL that everybody's watching these days. So we think about that for 100 years, the officials at NFL said, well, they're not as smart as white people. So therefore they have a higher burden of proof to show they have been impaired. Anyway, you asked about race. Race is part of our existence, but the point is, as Janet said of Bowdoin, it's getting better. It's getting better because more people are getting more opportunity and they're seeing that if you treat people equally, we can make the pie bigger. We can benefit from experience of the Latin people, the Asian people, the black people, the African people. We can all get better as a result of a build a better culture, build a better country. Bill, I'm going to look at the camera and thank you for such an encouraging comment and answer to that question. Thank you so much. Rob. Mr. Secretary, you've worked and you've known so many people through the course of your career. And I'd like to just throw out a couple of names and just if you could just kind of give me just a sentence or two of what your thoughts. Bill Clinton. One of the smartest people I've ever met has an incredible mind. He has a great heart. And I am so grateful that he gave me an opportunity to do something that's never been done before. And so I'll always be grateful to him for putting trust in me and putting me in that position because there are many Democrats who are upset with him saying he didn't vote for you, he didn't contribute to you. He usually doesn't support any of your program. You're putting him in that position. So he had a lot of flak he had to take. I had very little had some of the Republican side that said, you're a traitor to serve a Democratic president. Beyond that, there was a greatest experience in my life. President Biden. Joe is still Joe, although I can't hold that anymore, but he's a good Joe. And I went to Congress the same year. I went to the House in 72, he went to the Senate. Over the years, we became friendly. His son, Bo, interned one summer for me in my office and my son, Kevin, interned in his office. So I got to see Bo Biden. I can understand why President Joe chokes up whenever he mentions son. He's just a great kid and had a tremendous future ahead of him. So Joe Biden has a great heart. He is somebody who traveled with me one time. I won't take the time to tell you we went to Russia together to try and make a presentation on arms control. I had asked President Reagan if I could bring one Democrat and he said, absolutely. I picked Joe Biden to go with me. That's cool. Bill, we're almost running out of time, but I want to mention one name to you who was in your class who after he heard I was going to interview with Rob, took me to lunch. His name is Peter Webster. And I know you know Peter Webster very well. He insisted on meeting with me before and he's done some projects with you. And the one thing that he told me is that you folks went to Fort Lauderdale on spring break, which I also did my junior year, Bill. But because we're running out of time, I can ask you what happened there because what's happened in Lauderdale stays in Lauderdale. I can't thank you enough for this wonderful interview. I'm pleading the Fifth Amendment. I'm sorry, whatever Peter told you, I'm going to just plead this. Do we have time to ask Bill one more question? Yes, but I did want to mention Peter Webster. He says to say hi. But I wanted to give Bill an opportunity to talk about any new initiatives, any new books, anything that you're working on that we should know about. A book of poetry, the greatest poet at Bowdoin College was Wadsworth, long fellow, and number two was Bill Cohen. William Sebastian Cohen. Yes. Well, I've been doing a lot of reading rather than writing, but for the past 10 years or so, I've been the producer of Janet's play and that play has now been performed in about 35, 40 cities. It also was performed in the United States Supreme Court and also in Amsterdam. So I've been producing that, which is like owning a stable of race horses in terms of the expense of it and all the details that go into that. But lately I've just been reading. I've been reading a lot. I have a copy of Pat Moynihan's papers that came out and it's brilliant. His papers he gave to the Library of Congress. It said the total of the papers would be three times the height of the Washington Monument. So I'm working my way through that. I'm reading the book I told you, The Coming Wave. I've been reading a couple of books written by James Love Luck. He was a British inventor, physicist, humanitarian. He lived to be 103. And I saw interviews with him when he was 102. And I said, I've got to read this man. So I've been reading his book, A Rough Road to the Future and another one called Novocene. And they're brilliant books about where we're going with technology. So I'm focusing on some of the history. I've been reading Chris Buckley, whom I think is one of the best comedic satirists in the business today. And once I started reading him, I started reading his father's books and papers. So I'm doing just a lot of reading to try to catch up on books that I have. I have about two to 3,000. And I have another 1,000 on Kendall. So it's, I have my little Kendall that I go at night till three in the morning trying to read the works of other people. So that's what I do in my spare time. Well, Bill, three comments. I've written a couple of books, a law book on how to handle personal injury cases and a book about my daughter who's transgender. Well, I've been asked to produce a musical about Bobby Rydell, who became a very dear friend of mine and who was had big hits when you were a Bowdoin. The other thing is I want to tell you that we are about to interview next, our next interview, a 101 year old man from my neighborhood who was just like the guy you talked about, sharp as a tack. And you saying that you had a conversation with that man is inspirational. I just can't tell you how impressed I am with your career. And you have a thousand books to read and many years to read them. Go ahead, we've got a few more minutes. One more thing, Senator Mitchell. Senator Mitchell is one of the giants, certainly in main history, and I would say our country. You cannot look at his career, what he is able to do with a Good Friday agreement, but to lead the Senate majority in the way he did it with such intelligence and skill and humor. He's got a great set of funny bones in him and I can just tell you it was a joy for me to represent the state of Maine with him. And even though you picked him as your number one in me, number two, I have to point out that I was the senior senator and he was the junior senator. I forgot that part. He became majority leader and he had used that as a club over me ever since because I as a senior senator always got priority. And he said that's why he ran to be majority leaders. So he would give speeches and then I would have to follow him. So, but I want to say following George Mitchell was one of the real honors in my life. He is one of the finest people that I know and certainly one of the finest public service. And you two people, he's in a part as far as I'm concerned. Well, and as a manor looking at the Senate at that point in time where you had Senator Cohen and Senator Mitchell, as I said earlier, that was at the top of the scale. And we've had others, Olympia Snow, Stephen Collins and Margaret Chase Smith. We've been fortunate. Angus King, unbelievable. Yeah, we've had a distinguished statement in this thing. Well, we should have a couple more minutes, please. Would you say, Bill? Margaret Chase Smith. Margaret Chase Smith, absolutely. Yes, of course, yeah. Yeah, Bill, is there anything, first of all, with all the issues that we talked about today, are you planning to continue to speak out and get involved in the upcoming campaign in any way? What are your plans? Because your voice, particularly as a Republican and what the Republican Party really represents over the course of our history needs to be heard. I mean, what are your plans going forward, Bill? Well, I still plan to speak out. I am invited to go on CNN from time to time. Bill's on MSNBC, Bloomberg, BBC. So whenever I am called upon to say something, I try and speak out. I am also joining with an effort to discourage the creation of a third party. I think the next election is so serious in terms of whether or not we're gonna continue as a Democratic country, a Democratic Republic, that bringing in a third party, even though there are a lot of people who are unhappy with both choices for whether it's Trump or President Biden, creating a third party will only result in the election of Donald Trump. And I think that would be disastrous for our country. There are Republicans out there who are running, any one of which we could look to and say, that's a better choice, but re-electing or electing Donald Trump, I think would pose a clear and present danger. We've seen what he has done. We saw him try to bribe and extort money from Ukraine. We saw what he did and encouraged people to storm the Capitol. We know what he wants to do in terms of military taking the military and politicizing it. What other president in the history of this country has ever called for the execution of the General of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? That is something that's such an anomaly. It is so outrageous that any individual, not to mention the Commander-in-Chief, saying, I want to have the death penalty. I should have had the death penalty if this had been tried in the past because he's a traitor. We owe an allegiance to what the chairman did. He saved our country, our democratic form of government. And the notion that you would call for his death, assassination, encouraging others by implication to carry this out as one Congress that he should be home. To me, we are, as I've said to others, we are taking Pat Moynihan's words, defining deviant behavior down. We are lowering the bar of acceptable behavior to say that you have a president who can engage in the kind of behavior he did, who can say that John McCain's not a hero. All of the things mock disability. I'm sorry, that we cannot afford to have a third party. I might have been in pass supportive of that to ought to break the log jam, but in this particular case, it's the most dangerous thing we can do. So I'm going to join a bunch of Dick Gappard and others and try to encourage states to make sure they don't change things. Thank you, Bill. We're out of town, Bill, but I just only have one request. I would love to have you back on either before or after the election. Thank you so much for this interview and your incredible wisdom in discussing these issues. Thank you so much, Mr. Secretary, Ms. Senator Cohen, Bill Cohen, to all of us in Maine. Thank you, Bill. Thank you very much. Thank you for this opportunity. Thank you.