 It is now my great pleasure to introduce our next speaker, our nation's highest ranking intelligence officer, director of national intelligence, James Clapper. In his role as DNI, director Clapper leads the United States intelligence community and serves as the principal intelligence advisor to the president. General Clapper retired from a distinguished career in the U.S. Armed Forces in 1995. As the Lieutenant General in the U.S. Air Force and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. After working the private sector for six years, General Clapper returned to government service in 2001 as the first civilian director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, known today as the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. He then went on to serve as the Undersecretary of Defense on Intelligence before becoming DNI in 2010. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming our director of national intelligence, General James Clapper. Welcome. Thank you Mark for that kind introduction and thanks for being such a great host. And for whomever decided I should follow Chancellor McRaven, I'll offer a much more sarcastic thanks. It seems to happen every time I come here. In all seriousness, Bill McRaven is a great American, a skilled warrior, and someone I consider a personal hero. He's a national icon. Now I follow the advice and counsel without question that Bill McRaven has offered. And I know you're all familiar with his iconic advice to the first thing is to make your bed. I know you've heard that. And so I did have to, it was a very early get up for me this morning because I flew here this morning. So I was going to endeavor to make my bed just like Bill advises, except I got a gruggy but assertive voice from my wife, not this morning. But I tried. But he's right about that. There is wisdom here. If you can't do the little things right, you never get the big things right. And following Bill at the lectern is a big thing. Bill did an excellent job of capturing the essence of the challenge for intelligence. To eliminate or at which we rarely can do or at least reduce uncertainty for a decision maker, whether that decision maker is in the Oval Office or to stretch the metaphor an oval foxhole. So Bill, thank you once again for your long and distinguished service and your friendship. Also, I want to pay tribute to a mentor of mine, Admiral Bobby Inman, just as he's mentored Admiral McRaven, he's mentored me for a lot of years. Admiral Inman officiated at my promotion ceremony for Colonel in 1980, 35 years ago. And I've never forgotten that. He's been a great mentor to me ever since. I actually, I'm very, very pleased and honored to be just a small part of this very significant milestone. It's a significant milestone, obviously, for the Central Intelligence Agency, but it is also one for the entire intelligence community. This afternoon, John Brennan, I thought did an excellent job of taking a long historical look at the President's Daily Brief, along in terms of the year span. I could not be prouder. I could not ask for a better partner, colleague, friend, and, as we call each other, foxhole buddy than John Brennan. And I'm so proud of the relationship that we have had during not only going back to John's tenure in the White House and now in his great service as Director CIA. And he spoke very eloquently, I thought, about the significance of the PDB as did our panel members from the Kennedy and Johnson years. By the way, the CIA modernization effort that John talked about, integrating the disciplines and capabilities across the agency, reflects changes that we've been making as an intelligence community. And they will make the agency faster and more responsive to world events. John's superb leadership in bringing changes about has been tremendous. I could talk for hours about how these improvements at the CIA will make the entire IC better. But I recognize I'm the last keynote speaker and I'm standing between you and the reception, so I won't. So today, we've of course focused on a single vital daily intelligence product. PDBs, as you've heard, are at the apex of the intelligence production food chain. And I don't think any other nation on the planet would look back, open and expose intelligence work with the significance of what we're declassifying. One of my major takeaways from the controversies of the past few years has been that, yes, we have to protect our secrets, our sources and methods, our tradecraft, but we have to be more transparent about the things that we can talk about. Because although for most of my 52 or so years in the intelligence business, we haven't talked publicly about our work, at least very much. Now I think the American public expects us to talk about how we're using the power of U.S. intelligence responsibly. That's a lesson I personally believe we didn't learn quickly enough. And that we, by the way, certainly includes me. And so more and more, we're discussing our work to help correct misunderstandings and to try to help people grasp what we do to show that we're worthy of America's trust and to prove that we make worthwhile contributions to the security of Americans and our friends and allies around the world. It's why over the past two years the community has declassified thousands of pages of documents about our work, and importantly about the oversight of our work that's conducted by all three branches of our government. By publishing these declassified documents on our Tumblr site, I see on the record, and pushing them out on Facebook and Twitter, they reach millions of people in the U.S. and around the world. That includes, as well, our adversaries, who have also learned a lot from our transparency. And Edwell M. and I think spoke very compellingly about this dilemma. But we believe transparency is worth the cost. Releasing historical documents like we're doing today is another way we can talk about what we do, while protecting the tradecraft behind today's intelligence work. And I believe the PDBs we're releasing today are from a particularly interesting time in our nation's history. I received my commission in the Air Force when Kennedy was president. In fact, in August of 1962, I met President Kennedy at the ROTC summer camp I was attending at Otis Air Force Base, Massachusetts. And as luck would have it, I was in the front row of the rope line, and the president Kennedy came by and spoke briefly to each cadet, most of whom, when he asked, were planning to be pilots. He got to me and he asked me what I plan to do in the Air Force, and I said I wanted to be an intelligence officer. And he simply said, that's good. We need good intelligence officers. Never forgot that, obviously. So I also served a course in Air Force intelligence through the Johnson's, President Johnson's time in office, and served two tours in Southeast Asia, the first one in Vietnam in 1965 and 66. All to say, this event has personal significance for me. I think there is a certain relevance and cemetery to John opening today's event, and my briefly closing it. And I'm here, of course, because 10 years ago under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, the management of the PD process moved from the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, to the office of the Director of National Intelligence. And so as a result of that, in the past decade, the PDB truly has become an IC product, as John mentioned. But we've tried to build on the PDB process, tried to build on the foundation of CIA's tradition of excellence. And I think I can say, and I'm proud to say it, that I believe the intelligence community, writ large, is living up to that CIA legacy. CIA continues to be the mainstay of producing PDB articles. But the rest of the IC makes major contributions as well, all 16 components of the community. Every intelligence agency and element has contributed material that has made it to the president. It is truly a community effort. It's been an honor this afternoon to be at this library to talk about the work of our top analysts. President Johnson himself once said, quote, a president's hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right. Having worked closely with and for our current president, I can absolutely vouch for President Johnson's words. Knowing what is right, deciding what is right, is the president's hardest task. And the IC can't decide for him what is right. We wouldn't want to. But when it comes to national security, it is our job to give him the intelligence he needs to help make those hard decisions. I can also vouch that our current president is a faithful and voracious consumer of intelligence. And he's been right there with us through the difficulties of the past few years. I believe he has a profound understanding of the intelligence community, the intelligence process, where his intelligence comes from, and importantly, the men and women who do all that. So today as we celebrate the release and publication of the documents that inform President Kennedy and Johnson, each the most powerful man in the world in his turn, I want to assure the American public that today's intelligence and today's PDBs live up to the CIA's tradition of excellence, exemplified by the briefings you can now read here in President Johnson's library. And that today's PDBs tap the excellence and the diversity of thought of the entire intelligence community. So again, it was a great honor for me to be here and play a small part in this really significant milestone, not only in the history of the CIA, but the intelligence community. Thanks very much. Thank you very much, General Clapper. To conclude our conference, I'm going to bring up my friend Joe Lambert once again. Joe, Joe, I want to thank you and the CIA for not only releasing these documents, which are really a treasure trove to history, but for helping to organize today's conference. So thank you so much. Did you stay here? Yeah, of course. Well, as Mark said, this concludes the event today. The documents that were referenced throughout the day are live right now on the CIA's website so you can gain access to them right now. Would you join me in thanking all of our senior intelligence community speakers today in the front row, both current and former? I think they did a terrific job giving you insights into the PDB and the process. And as I thank you, we have a small token of our appreciation. We'd like to give three organizations. So if I could ask for those right now. So the first one is for Mark up to Grove in the LBJ library for your help. It is a nice, nice piece of crystal that has the CIA seal and today's event on it. Thank you. We have one for the University of Texas, so Adam McRavid, if you could come up for this, please. And we have one for the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. So Jim Hughes, if you're in the audience, could you please come up? Thank you, folks. Safe travels home.