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>> I'm Susan Collins the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean
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 is the President
of McGraw-Hill's 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.
[applause] 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 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 sort
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 build the wonderful Weill Hall.
And just last month he delivered the charge to the Class of 2013
and we very much appreciated that.
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's School yearlong
celebration of President Ford's remarkable life and career.
The naming of the University of Michigan's 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 Weill Hall.
Well now we're just a few months away
from our next transformational effort and that is
in 2014 the Ford School will recognize another centennial the
100th anniversary of our schools founding.
This milestone arrives at the start
of the 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.
While many members of the Ford School committee
who have helped us 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 slide show
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 and our facilities they really highlight
that year long celebration.
And of course 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 the nation President Ford really had a gift
for bringing people together.
Dr. Kissinger I think 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 is 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 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 [applause]
>> 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 chord problem so he's protecting his voice
but he was good enough even
with this new thing he's not old enough to have
but he found his way here tonight
so it's 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 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.
>> Dr. Kissinger: I've known 10 presidents and one
of the main characteristics of presidents is
that they spend 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 which 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 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.
Oppositions International, 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 characteristics of President Ford was
that what you saw is 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 that we made in that sense,
I told him it was in 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 Libya.
And I said, I was Secretary of State, I said,
"I'm planning to go there."
And whenever the date and I realized
that this is two weeks before the Texas primary
and "if you want me to I can put if off a few months."
He said "No, we're not making the foreign policy dependent
on my primary."
And the primary was a disaster because in Texas they were not
for majority rule in Rhodesia and Libya 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,
he was not a rehearsed presidency.
It was a mid-west figure who did what he thought was best
for his country and as I've 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 himself.
And as it turned out [inaudible] 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
that came from the foreign policy side interesting thing is
as a mid-westerner
from relatively small town he was exactly the sort of guy
that European intellectual leaders might have looked
down on as naive but as it turned
out he became a close personal friend of people
like Harold Smith [inaudible] 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 through [inaudible]
from Canada who was, if I may say so was somewhat snobbish,
he became a good friend but when we get
to the questions I will be glad to answer.
>> Paul O' Neill: 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 that's another place you may have heard
of and I came into government actually in 1961.
It sounds maybe naive now but you know when Kennedy said
if you want to make difference come here and help so I did.
I didn't know that you weren't supposed to respond so I went.
And fortunately I got recruited into what was the Bureau
of the Budget in January of 1967 because President Johnson
at the time called in the Director of the Bureau
of the Budget and said to Charlie Schultz,
"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 background
in economics and operations research and I was one
of those people that got recruited to come
and help install the McNamara ideas and the domestic part
of government so in a parallel track President Ford served 25
years in the Congress and he was there 25 years
and served 23 years on the Appropriation Committee
and he was fascinated by the Appropriation's 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 a President.
Harry Truman had some similar claims because of his time
in the Congress but a lot
of the 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'll never forget.
He called me in and he wanted me to explain the economics
of cloverleafs on interstate highways systems and what kind
of businesses would be attracted
and what would happen to property values.
That's how his mind worked.
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 worked, why they worked,
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 month I must have spent 300 hours sitting
at the corner of his desk talking with him,
others present, whatever their specialties were, discussing how
to allocate resources against all the competing needs
in the federal government.
I'll never forget one night about ten o'clock
after we'd been at it for what seemed
like forever there was a line,
I'll never forget 15 million dollar increase
for retired military pay and he said
to me Paul why is this 15 million dollars 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 to know the answer
to every question he could ask before he could think to ask it.
He never let me forget the 15 million dollar 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 I have an occasion
when I was as at the Ford School he would be appalled
to hear people talking about the deciding what percent
of GDP we ought to spend on national defense
because he knew how many people we needed in each
of the uniformed services from an analysis of threats 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
for stealth bombers they came
out of his administration's investments and research
and development and he understood at the same time
that money we spent on national security issues was money we
could not spend on other important public policy needs
so he weighed all those other things really carefully.
I tell you what.
It was the greatest experience to work with someone
so clear-headed and devoted to the country
and for 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 up-lifter of people, 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
that it is the most meaningful lasting recognition of his life
because young people hopefully will carry his values forward
from the training they get from 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.
I was thinking about this coming over.
Maybe it's a function of getting old but it used
to be I think you could name the hot spots in the world
where things were unraveling and there was civil unrest.
You have to have an Excel spreadsheet now there are
so many out there so Henry, talk to us about Syria.
>> Dr. Kissinger: That's a problem
with 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--
I taught a course on policy making.
I also would say you begin with analogy.
You have to begin explaining where you are and then you have
to follow it with objectives.
Where are you and what are you trying to do?
And then you have to 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 is a country it has
this border.
First of all Syria is not an 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 U.N. mandate.
The neighboring country, Iraq was also given an odd 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 dealing
with the United States.
It has a founding father and a long history 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
in the United States because every ethnic group votes
for its own people so you're right back where you started.
You don't get a national consensus.
Moreover, these ethnic groups are very antagonistic
to each other so you have Kurds, Druzes, Alawites, Sunnis,
en to twelve Christians ethnic groups and they've been governed
by the last 20 years by the Alawites minority which is
about 30 percent but most of the army and much
of the army is Alawite because Alawites were in the poor region
and joining the army was a way of coming up in the world.
So even they only had 30 percent
of the population they had 80 percent of the army.
You don't understand what's going on that's the [inaudible]
in addition most of the other minorities supported the
Alawites only because they were afraid of the Sunnis not
because they liked the Alawites and the [inaudible]
of course Alawite military family.
For the current Assad who was 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 Lebanon for four years
with his wife practicing his profession when his brother
who was supposed to succeed his father was killed
in an automobile accident and he was brought back to Syria
so he is described in Armenia as the bad guy
and that's largely true but he's also incompetent and unsuited
for that office on those grounds because he had to assume
if you make ophthalmology your profession this is not--
if you're driven by a huge hunger for power.
[Laughter] so then the revolution breaks out
and the American press it's described as a conflict
between democracy and a dictator
and a dictator is killing his own people
and we've got to punish him.
But that's not what's going on.
It might have been started by a few Democrats
but on the whole it's an ethnic and sectarian conflict and I'd
like to add another thing.
The Alawites are Shiites and so that's enmeshed
in the historic Shiites 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 read 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,
inconceivable, I mean I'm all in favor of getting rid of Assad
but the dispute between us and the Russians on that issue was
that the Russians say you start with getting rid of matter
of fact that's not the issue but you break
up the state administration and you'll wind up like in Iraq
that there is nothing to hold it together and then you have
on even worse Civil War.
So this is how that [inaudible].
There are three possible outcomes an Assad victory,
a Sunni victory or on 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.
That's the outcome I would prefer to see and that's the one
but that's not the popular view.
I don't see, if you put either of these sectarian groups
in charge there will be a blood bath and so
if one wants a humane outcome.
I also think that that ought to go
but I don't think that that's the key.
The key is it's like Europe after the 30 Years War
when the various Christians Groups were killing each other
until they finally decided that they had to live together
but in separate units but that is the fundamental issue
and we're beginning to move towards that but it's going
to be very tough on top of it is the fact
that the Iranian problem, the Iranians have a terrorist force
in Lebanon which is Shiite they have now intervened
on the Alawite and the Shiite side
and then you have an Kurdish unit in the north
that wants to break off.
It's a really tough issue and I think we're now beginning
to head towards a conference but it's almost inconceivable to me
that you can form a national coalition government
where they can govern together and have [inaudible] run
through the whole country.
What will probably happen is
that that the country will lose its unitary character
that has other problems because it may risk that one
of these units gets captured by terrorists
and the terrorists are already very active on the Shiite side
and various Al Quaeda groups
so that's the description 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.
>> Paul O'Neill: So Henry let me do another 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 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 Brazil.
We have civil unrest in Greece and the problems exist
in different places for different reasons
but my question to you is this, 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 can take
in our foreign policy and our economic policy
that would promise more hope for the coming generation?
>> Dr. Kissinger: I'll answer that 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 exploited.
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 all to get nuclear weapons and I think now we
and 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 altered only by the fact
that the fundamental question you asked is there is so much
to turmoil in the world.
What's the reason?
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 the 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 has a multiplier effect built into it.
Secondly, the nature
of the modern communication systems facilitates the coming
together of groups that share nothing except their resentment.
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 the terrorist groups
but also others that have tremendous impact
in their society so that governments get preoccupied
with dealing with these various groups then there's an issue
that I personally believe
but your 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.
So when you look at the leaders that emerge all
over the world they're hugely sensitive to public opinion even
when they're dictators they take constant polls.
Then you have societies, take China now,
they've got to move 400 million people
from the countryside into the cities.
First, that's a huge technological infrastructure
problem and secondly, if it teaches anything it is
that 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 but also seems to be happening is
when you look at the per capita income
when these development projects start they are mostly
about infrastructure that make it a huge problem
but once you get per capita income
above six thousand you have a lot of little enterprises
which are uncontrollable by total planning.
I was meeting with a group the other day about China
and we always read about the SOEs.
It's government supported sponsored enterprises.
To my amazement it emerged that there are only 400 of those
that are run by the federal government and 123 thousand
that are run by local government, cities,
provinces that produces automatically.
Now in states that are less disciplined so you have a lot
of turmoil around the world but on the positive side
of course [inaudible] never had
such a tremendous explosion of [inaudible].
>> Paul O'Neill: Henry, I think they want us to see
if we can take a few questions from the audience.
So I wonder if we could do that now.
Do we have, yes.
>> Today President Obama was in Berlin
and discussing the potential to shutting Guantanamo Bay and I'd
like to know what your thoughts are
and where you think we might be best served
[inaudible] Presidents?
>> Dr. Kissinger: My basic instinct have not
because when I see pictures of Guantanamo I'm not [inaudible]
by it but 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 end and we have found
that maybe 70 percent of the prisoners
that we have released have gone back to terrorist activities
so you've got to put them somewhere
and when the President was considering closing it right
away they were exploring various state prisons
or federal prisons.
Nobody wanted them.
No state wanted them and you'd have colossal other problems.
If you help people of course
if they're mistakes made then it's a tragedy
but the criticism isn't mistakes
but almost invariably these are people connected
with terrorist activities.
So I'd prefer another solution.
If nobody can come up with another solution I'd rather keep
it than abolish it and turn them all loose again.
>> This is getting back to China and before President Ford
when you were in the Nixon administration and the opening
to China occurred in a certain way under a President
who was seen as anti-China, anti-Communist
in certain ways what happened nothing
like that would ever happen.
Then [inaudible] how that came about [inaudible] with China
and then the role of China in the modern world now in terms
of the future of China in a global pure political scene?
>> Dr. Kissinger: Well 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 thousand 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 the war.
And he concluded that here were China had 800 million people
that were not part of the world anymore
and then it was essential to bring them
into the international system.
So he made that decision very early and it
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.
There was only one embassy in Europe and Warsaw where,
we occasionally had contact with them
so the first problem we had was how do you reach the top
level Chinese?
We thought at first we'd go
to the most independently minded Communists we knew
which were the Rumanians who had been hostile to Prussia.
So we went to the Rumanian's and they did send messages
but the Chinese didn't trust any Communists even though they were
the terrorist but they didn't trust any Communists
that was related to Moscow so I won't go
through all the by ways we had to go.
We finally 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 there had been no contact
in Warsaw at which there 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 said let's scrap all this.
We wanted to scratch the basic relationship so we exchanged
and the way we exchanged messages was
like from a spy story.
We are used to texting.
In those days they wrote out their messages to us by hand
and delivered them in Pakistan
and Pakistan then sent their messenger envoy
over with the message.
We answered typed on unmarked, unsigned, unaddressed paper
so if the Chinese saw it then we could deny it and so this went
on for nearly three years until we came together and I was sent
to Beijing as the envoy of the President
and I was sitting there for 48 hours without any communication
and I could have finished the Nixon presidency if I screwed up
but there was one amusing aspect of this.
Every visitor going to China was dying to see Mao.
My problem was the opposite.
I knew that Nixon wanted to be the first person to meet Mao
and so I found myself the in Beijing and we now know
from the record that Mao had given instructions
that the minute I asked to see him I should be brought in
but he didn't want to be in the 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
to ask of Chou En-lai as my [inaudible] whom I dealt
with until after the Nixon visit,
after that I met Mao 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 the first four or five meetings
that I conducted there some
like college professors exchanging views about history
because we had decided [inaudible] that the issues
that 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 the basis for comparison
and as it turned out we were lucky
that Chou En-lai also did the same thing
and what it shows is throughout the basic principles
of negotiations should be not to haggle
about what causes a 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 what I've learned
from that is I usually begin a negotiation
by telling the opposite member what I want to achieve and why
because then it certainly is the Chinese case turned
out to be the right approach.
>> So 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 is going to happen?
>> Dr. Kissinger: It's a huge issue, first we have set
out 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 no method is off of the table.
Now if suddenly they emerge
with nuclear weapons our position would be very,
very, difficult.
Secondly, if Iran in practice
of nuclear proliferations [inaudible]
because if it continues then I think of what was required
in a two powered nuclear world in terms of warning systems,
safety systems, protect, command and control to prevent a war
and then you imagine 50 countries maneuvering
simultaneously without the technology it's almost kind
of [inaudible] that a nuclear war somewhere will start
which could produce hundreds of thousands
of casualties in hours.
When you look at 9-11 it discombobulated us
by nearly three thousand dead, no wounded,
no damage to infrastructure, it was bad enough
so secondly Iran is right now supporting many terrorist groups
all over the world.
If they now on top of it have nuclear weapons
and feel protected and third they have already proclaimed
that they want to exterminate Israel but I wonder urge those
of you who want to understand how fear those kids think they
really believe they have fulfilled,
I'm not saying they want to die in a nuclear war
but they have fewer restraints than most others so I think,
if Iran moved to its nuclear weapons it's very probable
that Israel will attack or very likely
so we'll see what happens.
I would say we're in the last year where you can still say
and negotiation and conceivably defeat
because with every year they're accumulating more
and more visible material.
With every year it becomes harder
to see whether they're building nuclear war heads
and most scientists believe that I don't know 6 months,
9 months if they keep accumulating visible material it
will be almost impossible to trace it back.
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?
>> Dr. Kissinger: Oh, you know when I was
in government I thought life was rough.
But in those days you still had committee chairmen,
don't did you think Paul?
Two or three times a year you could go to them and say, look,
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 I don't know,
theoretically you would like a more by partisan approach
but the way the [inaudible] campaigns are now conducted
people need so much money
that they get financed more by pressure groups.
In the House we get 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 but when Ford ran
for the Presidency I think
over 26 were considered contested now it's 6 to 8,
all the others that puts tremendous emphasis
on divisiveness in those states
where you're trying to move the few.
I don't know what it is answer is it's deeply concerning.
>> Paul O O'Neill: I'm going to have the final word Henry.
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 workers safety,
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 an unbelievably progressive idea
in the late 1960s and early 1970s and Wilbur Mills
who was then the chairman of the House,
Ways and Means Committee hadn't decided he wanted to run
for President we'd probably would have gotten rid
of a whole a lot of things that still persist
and have a clean straight forward simple way
to provide economics assistance to low income people.
So I think where we are is largely a function
of leadership or not leadership.
There's, God knows there are things we need to do.
So I'll end on that note.
On a public policy note that was one of the reasons I got fired.
It was clear to me and it has been for a long time
that we need fundamental tax reform in our country
so I'll tell you a few facts.
Right now our tax system is such a mess in the way it's designed
that it's significantly unenforceable and so
by best estimates we're under collecting taxes
that in theory are due and owing to the tune
of 4 hundred billion dollars a year and it costs us some place
between 3 and 4 billion dollars a year
on 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 700 billion dollar hole?
I personally believe it's a really significant issue not
just in economic efficiency but I think if you look at societies
that unravel or have difficulty going forward
and the 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 the national sport is tax avoidance or evasion
and so that most fundamental level of connection
where we're all somehow connected to the fabric
of government we've got what I believe is proof positive
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 this system.
So Henry would you like to end with some humor.
You have a wonderful sense of humor.
Henry, I tell you what.
If you don't know about Henry's humorous quotes you need to go
on Google and read about power.
>> Dr. Kissinger: But this is like an event that occurred
to me once where a lady came up to me one day and said,
"I understand you're a fascinating man."
She said, "Fascinate me."
[Laughter] [Applause]
>> Susan Collins: 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,
before I again thank our very special guests this evening I'd
like to think 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.
[Applause]