How Would Al Gore Govern in Foreign Policy?
Transition to Governing Project

June 14, 2000

Transcript prepared from a tape recording

Moderators:	E.J. Dionne, Washington Post
	David Brooks, Weekly Standard
Panelists:	Leon Fuerth, Office of the Vice President
	Dale Bumpers, Arent, Fox, Kinter, Plotkin and Kahn
	R. James Woolsey, Shea and Gardner
	Steven Solarz, APCO Associates
	Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times
	Carla Anne Robbins, Wall Street Journal
Project Directors:	Norman Ornstein, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
	Thomas Mann, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

Proceedings:

MR. MANN: My name is Tom Mann. I am a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and on behalf of Norman Ornstein and AEI and the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings, together with the Hoover Institution, I would like to welcome you to our session this morning on "How Would Al Gore Govern in Foreign Policy?"

This event today is part of a larger project called the Transitioning to Governing Project, which is funded by the Pew Charitable Trust. Norm and I co-direct that project. The broad goals are for us to recognize and better understand the ascendancy of the permanent campaign, to try to uncover how campaigning complicates and thwarts governing, and within the obvious reality that campaigns are about winning elections, to figure out how we can encourage events during the campaign, media coverage, transition planning--all that might in some way enhance the quality of governance after the election.

Let me say, we are very encouraged by what has transpired in recent months in both the nature of the campaigns and in the campaign coverage. I call your attention, in the materials that you have there a piece on how would Gore govern, how would Bush--that was in USA Today. It is characteristic, I think, of the kind of pieces that are beginning to appear.

Now, this past January, we had four "how would they govern" sessions that proved rather instructive. Since that, a lot has happened. Vice President Gore and Governor Bush have become the presumptive Presidential nominees of their parties and David Brooks has achieved fame, if not yet fortune, for his widely acclaimed work in comic sociology, Bobos in Paradise.

Today, we initiate a new round of governing discussions, this time focused on foreign policy questions. Indeed, I would argue that foreign policy, national security policy, is typically the least discussed but most important responsibility of the new President.

Now, our purpose today is not to debate the substance of policy. It is rather to better understand how Al Gore and George W. Bush, in our session next week, would actually govern on these issues, how they think about the world, how they conceptualize it, what their experience and practice has been in recruiting and utilizing staff, how they go about making decisions, decisions that can be deliberate and those that are in response to crises. How do they go about, or how would they go about building political support for their foreign policy initiatives in the Congress, in the country? In what sense do they appreciate the possibilities as well as the limits of Presidential leadership in foreign policy?

These are some of the questions that we hope to explore in our discussion this morning. And let me say thanks to John Fortier and others, we have assembled an extraordinary panel to explore these questions. As I said, next week, on June 22, we will have a similar session on Governor George W. Bush.

Our panelists are, I think, all well known to you. They are uniquely qualified to address these issues. You have full bios in your materials. Let me provide, though, just a brief introduction of each, beginning with Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas.

Senator Bumpers served for 24 years in the Senate after being first elected in 1974, and that came on the heels of his tenure as Governor of the State of Arkansas. He chaired the Small Business Committee and was a ranking member on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and also, of course, a member of the Appropriations Committee while in the Senate. After leaving the Senate, he became Director of the Center for Defense Information and a professor at the University of Arkansas. He is now with the law firm of Arent, Fox.

To Senator Bumpers' right is Leon Fuerth, the National Security Advisor to Vice President Al Gore. It is hard to imagine anyone better suited to offer us an understanding of Al Gore and the process of foreign policy and national security policy decision-making. In addition to being the Vice President, the Senator's principal aide on foreign policy, he has served on the Principals' Committee, the President's top foreign policy team during the Clinton-Gore administration. He first met Congressman Gore 20 years ago when Gore was assigned to the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and has worked with him on arms control, environmental issues, trade issues, and a range of other foreign policy matters since then. Before coming to Capitol Hill, Mr. Fuerth spent 11 years as a Foreign Service Officer.

Next, I would introduce our two award-winning reporters. Immediately to my right, Doyle McManus, who is the Washington Bureau Chief of the L.A. Times. He has reported on domestic and international issues for 25 years, winning awards for his diplomatic reporting from the National Press Club three times. He has written a number of books. He is currently working on a new book on post-Cold War military interventions. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 1978.

And we have as well Carla Robbins, who covers foreign policy for the Wall Street Journal and worked as a foreign correspondent in Central and South America, covered the Gulf War from Saudi Arabia. She is the co-winner of an Overseas Press Club award and has shared in two Pulitzer prizes at the Journal.

I then introduce Steve Solarz, sitting to Carla's left. Steve served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 18 years, becoming chairman of its Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs and the Subcommittee on Africa. He played a major role in the Congressional effort to restore democracy to the Philippines, abolish apartheid in South Africa, and bring peace to Cambodia in 1993. He is currently president of Solarz Associates and a senior counselor at APCO Associates.

Our final panelist is James Woolsey. Mr. Woolsey most recently served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1993 to 1995. He has had an extraordinary range of experience, serving in Democratic and Republican administrations, first beginning work on arms control while in the U.S. Army back in 1969 and 1970.

As I said, it really is an extraordinary panel and we are very grateful to all of you for taking the time this morning to be with us, and we have our return appearance by our co-moderators, David Brooks and E.J. Dionne. David is Senior Editor of the Weekly Standard, contributing editor at Newsweek, and a commentator on National Public Radio. He has been a reporter at the Wall Street Journal covering Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa, but David most recently is known for his wonderful new book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, and I recommend that you all of you rush out and buy a copy if you haven't already.

Our other co-moderator is E.J. Dionne, a columnist for the Washington Post and my colleague as Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was a reporter and editorial writer for the Post and a correspondent for the New York Times in Paris, Rome, and Beirut. E.J. wrote a wonderful book with a great title about a decade ago called Why Americans Hate Politics, another book called They Only Look Dead, and now within a month we will be bringing out What's God Got to do with the American Experience, and I might ask, what does that have to do with Al Gore making foreign policy? I give you E.J. Dionne.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much. First, I need to make one disclosure. This is an age of disclosure. I have to disclose that my wife worked for Steve Solarz as an intern in his district office on his committee staff and then moved on, and after all those years, she still liked him, which is not always common with employment on Capitol Hill, as you know. So my disclosure is that I come by my prejudice in Steve's favor honestly.

I want to say that we have a lot to cover, a panel that can do it brilliantly, and an audience with a depth of knowledge that will more than make up for whatever David and I fail to ask or know or notice or perceive, and we will turn to the audience early on and pray that you all help us.

With great appreciation to our participants and without wanting to waste any time, I turn to my friend David.

MR. BROOKS: We thought we'd start by opening it up with a general discussion of the Gore doctrine, of the Gore approach to foreign policy, and start with a question to Leon Fuerth based on the premise that there is a perception that there isn't a whole lot of difference between Gore and Bush on foreign policy. They both have generally similar views on trade with China. They were on the same side, roughly, on some of the Kosovo and other invasions, compared to the other Republican ideas, the other Republican candidates.

They have both talked in some similar ways about how we should engage with the world. I think Gore has used the phrase "forward engagement." Bush has used the phrase "competitive engagement." I don't know why he didn't think of compassionate engagement, but he didn't.

I was wondering if you could just describe what the world will look like four years from now under Gore and under Bush and what the crucial differences really are between the two.

PANEL DISCUSSION

MR. FUERTH: I have to start by spoiling your morning with a brief reference to my lawyers. As his National Security Advisor, I will restrict myself as much as I can--

MR. BROOKS: Use the mike.

MR. FUERTH: Is that working? Any closer and I'm going to be swallowing it. Is it working? Okay. This is great, folks. I have a pinched nerve in my neck so you can hear me at the expense of agony.

[Laughter.]

MR. FUERTH: And so if I don't look at the cameras, it's because I can barely get my head up that high.

As his National Security Advisor, I will talk to you about the past as prologue for the future, but I'm not going to jump four years into the future, and particularly, I will avoid comparison with whatever I think the future might look like if Governor Bush is elected President. But the Vice President has a deep enough record so that if past is prologue, I think I can do a pretty good job of responding to your question.

In his earliest actions and in his most recent comments, I think he has been pretty much all of a piece. Since I've known him, he's had this ability to spot things coming in over the horizon of events towards the world and towards the United States and to recognize some of those things as having potentially major import to all of us long before many others do, and to start gathering information about them, mastering the field about them, and beginning to think about the policy implications at a very early stage.

That would normally suffice for most people who have a great deal of intellectual curiosity, but it's the start of the process, because what begins then is an attention to the question of public policy and it's what should public policy be in light of a conviction that he will form that an oncoming event is going to have major consequences once it matures.

Having formed public policy in his own mind, the question is how to begin to create politics around it in order to generate the kind of support and understanding that would be needed if the policy is to become more than theory and to be carried out, and if it is an issue that is international in its repercussions, the next stage is how to begin influencing opinion abroad in order to create the kind of international climate that will be needed one day to sustain an American initiative.

And I have seen him do this repeatedly. He certainly did it, let's say, on the subject of global warming. I first heard about global warming from him at the beginning of his second term in the Senate. We had a retreat and he began to talk about it. At that point, not too many people in the Congress were conversant with the subject and fewer still spoke up about it. He began to absorb immense amounts of information, began to think about policy, began to reach out to his colleagues and work with them, began to organize international meetings, began to correspond with some international leaders, including Maggie Thatcher, as I recall, in order to begin to create not just an apprehension about the importance of this subject but beginnings of policy.

So that is the way he proceeds. That's the way he proceeded in arms control. That's the way he proceeded in the case of the Internet, whose importance he did recognize very early on and which he promoted.

I think that what he is trying to do now with the term "forward engagement" is to find a succinct way of describing that kind of process as a search for what is going to be important, either as a threat or as an opportunity, and an early decision to put resources in the path of that so as to influence it most effectively for the benefit of the United States.

MR. DIONNE: If past is prologue, I hope that means that Mr. Fuerth will reveal to us all of the secrets of Al Gore's interventions in the course of the Clinton administration. Thank you.

I'd like to turn to Senator Bumpers. In the administration, it was set off in that Al Gore was generally the hawkish one at the table. Can you tell us what you know about what the role Vice President Gore played in Clinton administration decision making, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Russia, the Middle East, you pick one or all, Senator.

MR. BUMPERS: Well, first of all, E.J., I don't have any personal knowledge of what role Al Gore played in the decision making process, especially on foreign policy and military matters. I do think that the President initially deferred to the Vice President simply because he had been on the Washington scene a lot longer, and secondly, because he had an immense respect for his intellect and his integrity.

But let me just say that I think that Al Gore's foreign policy would be very similar to that of Bill Clinton's, but I think also he'll probably be more aggressive. He will do more, if it's possible, more personal engagement. They all like to get on that 747 and practice personal diplomacy. When I first came to the Senate, John Tunney told me, he said, "You take away 'Hail to the Chief' and Air Force One and nobody would want the job."

But I think he will be very aggressive and I think that he will be hawkish, more hawkish, as you used that term, than Bill Clinton was. I should know more--this is really a subjective discussion. We are trying to deal subjectively with what a man will do in foreign policy if he is the next President, and that is a dicey situation. Al Gore was my seatmate for eight years. He was one of six Senators who voted for Desert Storm, despite my trying to change his mind. He had very strong feelings about it and they were very analytical and difficult to argue with.

But I think that the kind of foreign policies--he's got some impending problems that this administration has had that are going to get worse, and I'm not sure precisely what he's going to do. I was in China about a month ago, and I can tell you, PNTR is not at the top of their agenda. The top three things with China are Taiwan, Taiwan, and Taiwan, and that thing is very volatile and it's explosive. On the other side, there's Putin, who's doing some things right now that really cause all of us considerable concern as to what kind of leader he's going to be.

Then you add to that, when I left the Center for Defense Information to go down to Arent, Fox, there were 33 areas of hostilities in the world and probably growing by now. I think they will grow. They're all ethnic, they're tribal, they're religious, and they're very intractable at times.

But, as I say, if I know Al Gore, he will be very aggressive. He will work 18 hours a day to try to deal with those and he will try to deal with them on a personal basis. And I think he will--I hope he will surround himself with able people, like Leon here, who I would feel very comfortable being in the inner circles, and Al has a lot of those friends.

That's not much of an answer, E.J. That's the best I can do right now.

MR. BROOKS: Okay. We'll go now to James Woolsey, and we learned before, just chatting before, that Mr. Woolsey was once identified as Admiral Woolsey in the New York Times and now a third of the time he is now identified as Admiral Woolsey. But, in fact, he was never an admiral. He was Commandant of the Marine Corps, in fact.

[Laughter.]

MR. BROOKS: But the question to you, sir, is you were in the administration and have since been somewhat critical of the administration's foreign policy in the years since you left. Could you describe, from the inside or from the outside, how you saw Gore acting. Would the Clinton administration policy have been better if he had been in charge, and just what did he look like from your vantage point?

MR. WOOLSEY: I think the short answer to that, at least in my judgment, is yes. I think the Clinton administration's decision making on many, not all, aspects of foreign policy and national security matters has been rather focused on short-term political and public relations matters. And let me say a word about, from my perspective, Vice President Gore's style of decision making, which I think is rather different.

I first met him about 20 years ago when he was in the Congress, when Leon, whom I also didn't know at the time, called me. I had just gone back to law practice from being Under Secretary of the Navy, not an admiral. Leon asked me if I could come up to Capitol Hill to meet with Congressman Gore to talk about something I had worked on in the Pentagon, and I said, oh, you mean Navy matters? He said, no, when you were there before. I said, well, when I was there before, I was a lieutenant in the Army. What's this about? He said, well, it has to do with Code 50. Now, Code 50 was a computer program that was used for force exchange calculations in planning U.S. strategic weapons.

So I went up to the Hill and really a rather modest office, to put it mildly, there is Congressman Gore in his shirtsleeves with a large stack of computer printouts. Leon is sitting next to him and they are poring through the printouts. And I said, "Can I help," and he said yes. He said, "I'm very dissatisfied with the studies that get done in the government on arms control and strategic planning. It doesn't seem to me they emphasize survivability enough and every time they do a study, they say it derives from this old Code 50, and I understand you used to program this. Can you help me understand the assumptions and the model so we can get a model written that is more along the lines of what's important rather than what's not important?"

I said, "Well, Congressman, you broke the code. That's what it's all about, is understanding the half-dozen or so key assumptions in these models and let's see if I can remember. This was 15 years ago." So we pored through this for close to an hour and he took careful notes on a yellow pad, and after he understood the half-dozen or so key assumptions in the Code 50 model, he said, "Thank you very much," and I got up and went back to my law firm. I remember thinking at the time, this is a different kind of Congressman.

I had experiences in the administration, both working with the Vice President on the intelligence budget, working on matters related to Africa, and seeking his advice in my own resignation, which suggested to me that he is a man of substance, precision, and discipline in making decisions. I don't agree with him on everything, but I must say I think that on matters of foreign policy and national security policy, it would just be my personal prediction that you would see far more focus on long-term objectives and on substance in a Gore administration than you have in a Clinton administration.

On just a hunch, policy toward Russia may be somewhat similar. I don't really agree with that, but I think that looks like where the speeches have been. On trade, probably more emphasis on labor and environmental matters abroad. And on rogue states, probably more forceful.

I rather doubt in a Gore administration that if a former President of the United States, if there was an attempt to assassinate a former President of the United States, as there was by Saddam against former President Bush, I rather doubt that we would be limited to putting a few cruise missiles in the middle of the night onto an empty building.

MR. BROOKS: Can I just ask you, you mentioned your decision to resign and you consulted with the Vice President. Do you feel comfortable talking about what his advice was at the time?

MR. WOOLSEY: Yes. It was pretty straightforward. It was the fall of 1994 and there had been several anonymous statements by White House staffers saying the President wants Woolsey to resign, presumably because I had not fired anyone over the Ames affair since the four people who had major mistakes were all retired and I wasn't going to pick someone as a scapegoat and fire them.

That same month, a little airplane crashed into the South Front of the White House and the White House staff joke was, "That must be Woolsey still trying to get an appointment."

[Laughter.]

MR. WOOLSEY: That more or less accurately characterized my relationship with President Clinton, but not with Vice President Gore. So I went to see the Vice President. I said, "I've seen these stories. Does the President want me to resign?" And he said, "I don't think so, but I'll find out."

And he called me a day or so later. I went back to see him and he said, "No, he doesn't want you to resign. He thinks you're doing a fine job." I said, "But I don't think my relationship with him is likely to change, do you?" And he said, "I can't tell you there's going to be any major difference." And I said thanks, and I thought about it for a month or so and wrote a resignation letter.

But he was always someone in the Clinton administration that I could go to, consult with, get help in getting the intelligence budget through the Congress, count on to get into detailed analysis of what the problems of Africa were, working with the CIA analysts. He's a substantive man.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you, Marshal Woolsey, for that really helpful--

[Laughter.]

MR. WOOLSEY: Generalissimo, I really prefer.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: There's a contest going on here for the audience. We'll give the next title.

I'd like to turn to Steve Solarz, and it goes to something Dale Bumpers said. You were a leading supporter of the Gulf War and as Senator, Mr. Gore agonized a great deal and then voted for the war. I also like the idea of Solarz and Bumpers struggling for Al Gore's soul, which is what it sounds like here.

Could you describe what you know and understand about his decision, the kind of conversations you had with him, and although I know you're reluctant to do this, is there anything you care to generalize about watching that experience to what we know now? And I'd love Senator Bumpers perhaps to come in also, to talk about the two sides of this argument.

MR. SOLARZ: Let me say, first of all, E.J., that the best decision you ever made was marrying Mary--

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. It's true.

MR. SOLARZ: --who is obviously a shrewd judge of character.

[Laughter.]

MR. SOLARZ: I did have an opportunity to speak to then-Senator Gore about the impending vote in the Senate on whether or not to authorize the use of force to liberate Kuwait. We were facing a similar vote in the House. In the course of my conversation with the Senator, I was trying to put forward what I thought were both the substantive and political considerations involved, and Senator Gore indicated that he was interested not in the political aspects of it but in the substantive implications of whether or not to use force and indicated that it would be best if I focused primarily on that, which I did.

I must say, I think it was an act of not only wisdom but also considerable political courage, given where the mainstream of the Democratic Party was at that point in time, for Senator Gore to have spoken out and voted in favor of the Gulf War resolution.

Having said that, let me also say that while I think there are several significant foreign policy successes for which the Clinton-Gore administration can fairly take credit, including such things as NATO expansion, the progress toward peace between Israel and the Arabs in terms of the Oslo agreement and the peace treaty with Jordan, the events which are transpiring as we speak on the Korean peninsula, where it appears that this historic summit has the potential to move the peninsula closer to a real peace than we've seen for the last half-century, which in some measure is due, I think, to the policies of the administration. NAFTA and PNTR for China are also other successes, in my judgment.

But if there has been any one failure, I think it has been our policy toward Iraq. The truth of the matter is that eight years after President Clinton took office, Saddam is still in. The weapons inspectors are out. Iraq's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction are undoubtedly proceeding apace. Sanctions are beginning to unravel. The coalition which assembled to put him in his place is unraveling, as well. I think that Iraq is likely to pose a major foreign policy challenge for the next administration.

It seems to me, if I can just take a step back for a minute here and say that I think that the major strategic challenge that Vice President Gore faces politically in terms of this election is to figure out a way to simultaneously get the benefit of the successes of the Clinton administration, particularly in terms of this unparalleled economic prosperity we now enjoy, while at the same time making it clear to the American people that a Gore administration will not be a clone or an exact replica of the Clinton administration.

And I think one of the areas where the Vice President has an opportunity to do that is in the area of foreign policy, particularly in the area of what we need to do about Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and I would very much hope during the course of this campaign that the Vice President would spell out a policy making it clear not only that it's the objective of the United States to not simply contain Iraq but to bring about a change in the regime, but also that he has a strategy, which the current administration clearly does not, for bringing about this objective.

MR. BROOKS: Why don't we follow up just on that point with Doyle McManus. If Mr. Solarz says the main challenge is to build on the accomplishments of Clinton-Gore and yet show the differences, over the past few months as Gore has done the primary and now presumptive general election campaign, how has he done that? Has there been anything he's said during the past six months that has surprised you about his approach to foreign policy? Have issues like his stand on Elian Gonzalez or what many saw as straddling on the China trade vote surprised you? How has his performance as a foreign policy campaigner informed the way you see him?

MR. McMANUS: Well, David, I was surprised by what he said about Elian Gonzalez, but I don't think that has any place in the discussion of foreign policy.

[Laughter.]

MR. McMANUS: Speaking crassly as a reporter, I find the prospect of covering a Gore administration deeply distressing for three nonpartisan reasons. I find the prospect of a Bush administration distressing for different kinds of reasons, too.

One is continuity. I mean, I think you do have to start with the big fact that a Gore foreign policy will look an awful lot like a Clinton foreign policy.

Second is competence. This is a group of people who have been doing this for some time. Jim Woolsey's story about the way then-Congressman Gore immersed himself in issues and that carried through on arms control and environment, Al Gore hasn't just heard of these countries, he's been to a lot of them.

And the third and most distressing is his discretion. As one who's spent eight years trying to get Leon Fuerth and others to talk about what role Al Gore played in the counsels of this administration, I hope and trust we will know more about decision making in the Presidency of Al Gore than we did in the Vice Presidency of Al Gore. It is a little bit of comfort to hear Senator Bumpers say, "I should know more about what Vice President Gore has done."

[Laughter.]

MR. McMANUS: So there is a big caveat there about what all of us as outsiders are doing, trying to penetrate the decision making process of this man, who has actually carried out the role of Vice President and the discretion that that imposes pretty effectively.

Having thus tried to evade your question, let me hit what I think I can say about the differences. An awful lot of what the Vice President is saying does suggest continuity. There are two points where I think he would differ. They have been suggested already, two or three.

One is use of force. He has been readier to consider and to support military intervention, from Grenada in 1983, which was not the universal consensus among Democrats, to the Gulf War, to Bosnia in 1993. He is not a prisoner of the Vietnam syndrome.

The second issue, connected with that, is, unlike President Clinton who has spoken of what we in the press later dubbed the Clinton doctrine on humanitarian intervention, you won't find Al Gore talking about that kind of, as far as I have seen, that kind of broad commitment, undifferentiated commitment to humanitarian intervention, and indeed in Kosovo, he was stronger in his formulation of the prohibition of sending ground troops in March. So there is a kind of a double-edged issue there on the use of force.

But to me, the largest difference will be one of management and style. President Clinton's interest in foreign policy has been episodic throughout his administration. It was extraordinarily episodic, to use a euphemism, when he started out. It has become less so as he has become more experienced and more comfortable. Gore has been interested in foreign policy for a very long time and I think would immerse himself in the agenda more deeply and more passionately. In a kind of a funny way in that regard, Governor Bush is more like President Clinton in some ways than Al Gore is.

MR. BROOKS: Can I just say one word about the format? We're going to go down with one final question in our first round for Carla Anne Robbins, and then we're going to open it up and hope there'll be much more cross-talk between the people on the panel, so just to get our format straight.

MR. DIONNE: And the other announcement is that the transcript of this will be published under the title, "The Mystery of the Secret Behind the Veil of Al Gore's Foreign Policy Performance." Carla, help us through the veil here. We talked about this very difficulty before the session began, and I'd like to go back to a version of the question I asked Senator Bumpers.

It has been said that Gore was decisive in the administration deliberations on foreign policy, that he was quicker to make decisions than President Clinton. Our colleague, Karen Tumulty, I just want to read a couple of sentences from a piece she wrote in Time magazine which are instructive. She said, "In Haiti, the Vice President took on the skittish tacticians who fretted over the risks of invasion and the futility of trying to salvage a country that even in its better days was a social and environmental disaster." And then later on, she says, "In mid-1995, as a frustrated Clinton agonized over air strikes in Bosnia, Gore described photos of the Srebrenica woman who had hanged herself in despair and so on, pushing him toward action."

What can you tell us? What light can you shed on this general question of where he was?

MS. ROBBINS: You know, I think Doyle probably said it. The nicest explanation is its discretion both on the part of the Vice President himself, that if he played such a key role at key moments, it's been very hard as a reporter to find it out. Clearly, his level of experience, and clearly, the fact that he was chosen in the first place, I think do a good part to make up for a perceived lack of gravitas as well as a lack of a hard line in Clinton in 1992. I think that was one of the reasons he was chosen.

But it's been damn hard in the last seven years to figure out what Al Gore--he's sort of a black hole. I mean, it's--and then the question becomes, is it because he was just a really supportive Vice President and his staff was so good that they never leaked to us the definitive moments, or did Bill Clinton change him in some way, and I haven't made up my mind about that one.

If you look at the things that he did beforehand and the areas in which he has a clear expertise--arms control, proliferation concerns, desire to whack rogue states, as well as a concern for humanitarian and broader geopolitical issues in places like Bosnia, I mean, I think he is--one could believe that he is a much harder-line person than President Clinton. President Clinton agonized and it took him an awful long time to get there on action on things like Bosnia and on Haiti and isn't there yet on Iraq.

I would say that the one time that I found people in the administration happy to leak on Gore disagreeing with Clinton was on the subject of Iraq, that when they called off the strike, and I get so confused because of Kosovo and Iraq and everything. In the last year and a half, everything sort of melds together to me.

But I think it was in November when they suspended it because Saddam sent that lovely letter saying, oh, yes, yes, I mean it this time, and that people were quite happy to let us know that the Vice President wanted to go ahead with that. That was one definitive moment that we were allowed to see behind the veil, the enigma, and the mystery, as you put it, E.J.

I think the thing that disturbs me but also perhaps I can be comforted by is that Leon, when he was talking about the need to see things before they are coming and how the Vice President is a person who immerses himself and identifies crises long before they come and then begins to build international support, I would say that's probably been the biggest weakness of this administration, is to be able to identify crises long before they come, to build coalitions long before they come rather than to respond in an ad hoc fashion.

And then the question becomes, when they are saying that now, is it because the Vice President will do a better job at it, and why didn't he do a better job at getting them to do it for the last seven years? So those are the questions that I have, which are more questions than answers, but that's what enigmas and mysteries are about.

MR.BROOKS: Well, that sort of throws itself back to Leon Fuerth, the bearer of all the mysteries, having--

MR. DIONNE: He's carrying the enigma machine.

MR. BROOKS: I don't know if you need framing based on what you've heard so far, but it seems to me that some of the things we've heard over so far are first to be a little more aggressive maybe than the Clinton administration, certainly more discrete, and also more long-term in his orientation, just in his mental framework. And given that long-term framework, presumably, he's thought about what he would do as part of his first foreign policy endeavors in, say, the first 100 days or the first odd period of his administration when the Gore-Bumpers team takes over--

[Laughter.]

MR. BROOKS: --and maybe if you could answer that question, and in particular maybe go back to Steven Solarz's point about Iraq being one issue that has not been performed well.

I was struck by something the Vice President said at an APAC speech. "It is our policy to see that Saddam is gone," which suggests that if he said that, he's probably been thinking about it for a while and maybe has a way to get rid of him.

MR. FUERTH: That's exactly the way I feel about it.

[Laughter.]

MR. BROOKS: And now you understand what Doyle meant.

MR. McMANUS: This is the same answer he's given me for seven years.

MR. FUERTH: It worked beautifully, too. Can you all hear me this time around? It is on? Okay. Thanks. That makes it possible for me to sit up and see you all.

In his recent speeches, he has been talking about a distinction between a classic agenda and a new agenda, a new security agenda. A classic agenda he defines as the traditional issue of war and peace between sovereign states and he makes the point that we still have that agenda with us and we still have to deal with it. We're not in an age where all these things have disappeared.

With respect to the new agenda, he identifies things that, in some cases we're already all too experienced with, for example, international crime linked with international drug trafficking and its impact on representative government around the world. He talks about global pandemics, like HIV or malaria or antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. He talks about a gathering, a global environmental crisis. He talks about the necessity to make sure that the world's trading system and financial systems learn from the recent experiences that we had and are made less prone to a repetition of that kind of thing. Identifies, in short, a series of developments that are not peculiar to any one country and cannot be dealt with by any one country if it chooses to operate in isolation from the others.

So in terms of pointing towards where these oncoming things are, and he's already started to do that in these speeches, and I think you would find that those are identifying his navigation points over the long term and the future. It's not something that you fix up to be interesting in the first 100 days. It is where you want to go over the course of the time when you have the opportunity to move the government of the United States and to move international policy.

He also talks about foreign engagement, which we've described briefly. But in one speech, he identifies an element of foreign engagement, and that is to address the extreme poverty that still applies to billions of people around the world, identifying that, first of all, as obviously the source of a security threat because of its impact on stability in various regions, but a tremendous potential opportunity because those same poor people, if empowered and enabled, become a tremendous source of innovation and new market for all of the advanced industrial countries.

And he says that we have to shape the field of history so that it does not inevitably lead to the fields of war. So there is a sense of trying to figure out in the longest term available to a President how the resources and influence of the United States can be applied in a manner which at the other end of that effort arguably produces a world that's more secure for us and more compatible with our ideals as a nation.

And he's also saying that we have to spend more on foreign affairs, that we have grossly underinvested in these things and that it is at risk and also contrary to what the American people feel is their responsibility.

So I could go on, but I'm going to stop short. I just wanted to try to give you some indication. I can't give you a handy dandy plan for getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and if I had one, I wouldn't tell it to you anyway.

[Laughter.]

MR. FUERTH: What I can do is give you--because that would be the end of the plan, hence the need for quiet--

MR. BROOKS: He's not a big C-SPAN watcher. I don't think he--

[Laughter.]

MR. FUERTH: How do you know Saddam is not a C-SPAN watcher? He could be tuned in right this very minute. The question is, how do you pick out the fundamentals that you want to deal with.

I have one other thing to say, and that is as a participant in the Clinton administration, I have no complaints to make of it or criticisms to make of it. The central point that you have to realize is that it is history, which is going to change. Events will change. The premises for the policies that have evolved under Clinton will be tested by events yet to come, and so it's a mistake to assume that you could carry the habits of thought and the policies of this administration in a straight-line projection into the future because the future will not behave in a predictable fashion.

The question is, do you have the habits of thought and the attitudes and elements of character required to deal successfully not with the same old, same old problems repeating themselves, but with things we haven't even invented yet manifesting themselves.

MR. DIONNE: We now know no secrets will leak out of Los Alamos in a Gore administration. In fact, I am going to plead with Doyle and Carla to help us try to get some of these other answers, if it's possible.

But I'd like to turn to Mr. Woolsey. In different ways, both Bush and Gore seem to be applying Colin Powell's principles to military intervention abroad. From what you know of both men, what is the real difference? Is there a real difference? I was struck reading through some material that there is radical disagreement in the commentary on whether there is or is not a difference. I just quote two things. The Economist noted that after the Vice President's foreign policy speech, that he showed signs of an unusual combination of views, is conservative in traditional foreign policy areas, progressive on the so-called new security agenda. The upshot might produce a very different foreign policy under a Gore Presidency both from Mr. Bush and from Mr. Clinton.

And then Jacob Weisberg writing in Slate magazine says, in fact, there's little reason to think that the foreign policies of the two men would differ in substantial ways. When you discount the effort on both sides to gin up conflict, the significant foreign policy disagreements between Bush and Gore boils down to just a couple of issues. Could you talk about that, please, sir?

MR. WOOLSEY: I hasten to say I've never met Governor Bush and I haven't seen or spoken with the Vice President in the last five-and-a-half years since I resigned, so I'm flying a bit blind here.

But the one issue where their speeches clearly contrast and from what they've said on several occasions would seem to me to contrast is the very important issue of relations with Russia, attitude toward the ABM treaty, and attitude toward national missile defense. The Vice President seems to be, from what he's said so far, very much in the tradition of the Clinton administration of wanting to amend the 1972 U.S.-Soviet treaty as little as possible and supporting the administration's mid-course intercept system based on Alaska, and Governor Bush seems to be open to far broader changes or perhaps moving away from the ABM treaty and looking at the possibility of rather more ambitious and capable defensive systems.

I had an article published in National Review last week that opts in the general direction of what Governor Bush has said on this issue rather than Vice President Gore, so my own views are out there. But I do think that this is the one rather clear area in which they've both made major statements, there are major implications for the way the United States would be protected, would deal with the rogue state ballistic missile threat, would deal with relations with Russia, and on many other issues, I find just from reading their public statements the differences are rather nuanced and not real clear. But on this one, I think it's clear.

MR. BROOKS: Thank you.

MR. BROOKS: Why don't we go back to Leon Fuerth just for a quick question about intellectual influences. I was wondering if you could give us a vignette, maybe, of a time when there really was a tough decision facing the Vice President, maybe during Desert Storm or Kosovo, and if you could describe the books or the political figures he looks to for guidance, the magazines--aside from the Weekly Standard, obviously--or the writers that he tends to quote or the people he tends to call. How does he get his information and the views that matter to him?

MR. FUERTH: My immediate reaction to your question is who are these interlopers?

[Laughter.]

MR. FUERTH: I can't answer that kind of question. I don't keep track of what he's reading unless he happens to send a copy out to me, or who he's talking to unless he draws me into the conversation. I can talk about his approach to issues and his habits of thought and my experience with him, but I certainly can't document who's in his library or who's on the reading table, though it is very extensive.

His instruction to me a long time ago was, give him the best advice I could about what was good for the United States and leave the politics to him, and he's reminded me of that as intervals, as recently as last weekend when we had a discussion about an issue, and he means it.

I had to tell him that I followed that instruction as faithfully as I could, but obviously not to the point of becoming an idiot savant and only being able to think about policy and not about politics.

But the practical import of that is I have one set of books, which is what I think is good for the United States, and that's the set of books he's interested in, and I have told him things at intervals that have been, I thought, good for the United States but not good for him, and he's embraced, after analysis, what has been good for the United States in his opinion.

His stand on Iraq is well known, so I'm not going to go back to that, except to tell you that on the day he cast the vote when we walked out of his office to go to the elevator leading to the Senate floor, there were former supporters of his from New England out in the corridor who circled him as we walked, saying, if you vote for this war, you can forget about becoming President of the United States. So if you ever wanted to see an action based on principle and contrary to interest, that was it.

MS. ROBBINS: And he's paid for it enormously since then.

MR. FUERTH: We didn't notice.

MR. BUMPERS: I have a slightly different view of that vote.

MR. FUERTH: We did not know this, since you make that point. When that vote was cast, we were expecting tens of thousands of casualties. The most optimistic assessment of what was going to happen was Les Aspin's analysis, and that was, I think, in the vicinity of 3,000 fatalities. Nobody knew who cast that vote what the actual progress of that war would look like, least of all Al Gore.

Okay. As for global environment, anyone who sticks their head up about the global environment and begins to talk about the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions immediately begins to pay a political price. Anyone who sticks their head up and says that we're going to have to find more intelligent ways to grow economically begins to pay a political price among those who are not interested in finding the smarter ways to grow economically and still preserve the environment, and he's been at the forefront of that process at times when it's been contrary to interest.

We could go down the list. The point is that he will, once convinced that something is important, adhere to it and he'll take the lumps.

MR. BROOKS: Senator Bumpers, did you want to add something?

MR. BUMPERS: No.

MR. DIONNE: But you were about to say something that sounded interesting. I wouldn't want to cut that off. When you were talking about Al Gore's making the decision, you had a different perception, at least from some of what was said.

MR. BUMPERS: In my discussions with then-Senator Gore about that, he was very fervent in his opinion. I think it was reached after considerable agony on his part. And so far as whether or not that was a correct vote or not, I think, frankly, the verdict is still out on that. Most of us who voted for sanctions, the Democratic alternative, as you recall, was a very severe sanction against Iraq and the reason a lot of us felt the way we did about it was because of misinformation we got from the intelligence community. We were told that the republican elite guard of Iraq was the finest fighting force in the world. They could hardly wait to surrender. Then the army told us they had ordered on the basis of the Iraqi republican guard's abilities 17,000 body bags.

So my own personal view of that was, that deserves an awful lot of consideration before you start a military action with that kind of information in front of you, and as a result, we got the Iraqis out of--I don't want to get into a second debate on it. We got the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but Saddam is still firmly in control of Iraq. But I can tell you, you could argue either way on that. I'm just simply saying, I believe that the Vice President felt very strongly about his position. He believed that Saddam was a threat to the Middle East. The war was about oil.

Let me just add one other thing if I may, E.J. It's off that subject. The Vice President, as I said, he'll be more hawkish than President Clinton was and he will, as any President should, when it comes to foreign policy, you must, first of all, if you're in the United States, you must be cautious of the fact that you need to be supreme militarily, economically, and you also need--if you're that, you can be a world leader. You cannot alter other states' conduct, which is what we're always trying to do, unless you possess those things.

Talking about altering other states' conduct, you can only do that if they find it in their best interest. The only exception to that is when we offer money. We have been able to keep Egypt an ally essentially of Israel for a very long time for $3 billion a year, and we have been able to keep Jordan roughly quiet for a lot, lot less money than that.

But as I was going to say, Al Gore, I know this much about him. He has been a part of the administration that has given us an unprecedented amount of prosperity. He cast the deciding votes in a tie vote in the Senate in 1993, which, of course, in this Democrat's opinion is the reason we've had this unprecedented period of prosperity. But he will be more hawkish than I'd like for him to be.

With that, I think on foreign policy, he's going to be aggressive, he's going to be a hands-on, and I think he understands all the problems with China, India, Pakistan, all of those things as well or better than anybody in this room. So I'm going to feel very comfortable with him.

MR. DIONNE: I wanted to begin to turn to the audience, so I'd like for folks to conceive of some questions. Steve Solarz has worn this large smile through this whole discussion and I want to know what lurks behind that smile.

MR. : He looks like that all the time.

MR. SOLARZ: Well, it may be a reflection of some of the still unresolved differences in the Democratic party, that those characteristics of Vice President Gore which give Senator Bumpers reason for concern give me reason for hope.

[Laughter.]

MR. SOLARZ: I do, indeed, hope that he is somewhat more hawkish on a number of issues that confront the country. I have to say that I think his vote on the Gulf War was one of his finest hours. It clearly was a decision he made at the time on the merits, on the basis of what he thought was in the best interest of our country, and his position has been totally and completely vindicated by events. The notion that we'll never really know if sanctions would have worked if they had been given more of a chance is ludicrous.

I remember a few years ago, Bernard Lewis, one of the preeminent scholars of the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire in our country wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he asserted that, in retrospect, the argument that sanctions could have induced Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait was a palpable absurdity. We've had sanctions for a decade now and he still hasn't relinquished his weapons of mass destruction. There is zero possibility that they would have induced him to withdraw from Kuwait.

I think Vice President Gore recognized that and understood the enormous setback to vital American interests it would have been if he had been able--Saddam, that is--to consolidate his position in Kuwait. He bit the bullet, took the hard decision. It wasn't popular in the Democratic Party. He had every reason to believe that in terms of any future national ambitions he might have, that his vote would be an additional hurdle for him to have to overcome. But fortunately for him and for the country, the decision didn't hurt him politically and greatly advanced the interests of the United States.

MR. : Carla?

MS. ROBBINS: I wanted to ask Leon a question about Russia, which is probably the area where the Vice President has taken the most visible lead, and I have always been intrigued by the notion of the Gore-Chernomyrdin--perhaps it was unfortunate that it was Chernomyrdin, that's sort of an unusual buddy movie--but the notion of engaging elites in Russia and the long-range payoff of that, of developing relationships with people across a different spectrum, areas of expertise, both to change things on the ground in the near term but also to have longer-term relationships.

If you look now at Russia with a new leader and some disturbing things that have happened even as recently as yesterday, the jailing of a media head, what has the Vice President learned from this relationship over the last seven years that he's taken such a leading role in, and now that we have a new leader, how would he deal with Russia differently from the way the Clinton administration has done it and can we expect a tougher line on Russia, tougher love, or is it going to be the same?

MR. FUERTH: I was just reflecting on what exponential number to assign to a hypothetical question like that, to the second power, the third power, the fourth power.

Let me go back to the premise for the engagement with the Russians to begin with, which was something essentially commissioned by President Clinton and President Yeltsin at the Vancouver summit, their first summit. The notion was, and this is based on conversations that we had among ourselves before the summit, that if the Russians succeeded in making a shift to a law-based, market-oriented country, the implications of that for American security would be very profound.

Recognizing how tough that would be and also understanding that the United States could not do more than the Russians wanted to and could not bring resources to bear that would be more than marginal, the decision was still made to pitch in, and to the extent the Russians were ready, to work with them to help them make that transition.

That was what Gore calls the outframe, the larger outer dimension of a task. But the specific requirement in the commission was, get something practical done that would affect events on the ground. Enough of large statements. The statement that I gave you was the first and last large statement about what we were doing, and everything else about it was gritty detail, which is one reason we had difficulty talking to people about it. Their eyes would glaze over as soon as I began to run my finger down the agenda for these meetings.

We began initially by focusing on energy and on space, energy because we regarded it as a potential multiple hit, there would be large external investment available, and because it might affect the very bad impact that Russian energy practices had on the environment and stabilizing Russian energy production might help the world energy market avoid a crunch, as well. Space, because it was a possible win-win, where the Russians had expertise that we lacked and remained a world class space power even in the midst of economic collapse.

From that, it expanded outward, very often at Russian proposal, until finally this thing developed into an array that covered much of what went on in the Russian government--health, the environment, science, business, military to military, I would name them all, so it's just off the top of my head, and gradually over time things on the side between Gore and Chernomyrdin and some of the later prime ministers that were national security in their origins, not fit for a plenary meeting of a commission but useful to have in that channel.

I'm going to have to leave it to historians to figure out what the lasting consequence of that engagement really is, particularly since President Putin is in the very early stages of his administration and it really is too soon to start deciding what he is going to bring. We're going to have to play this out and see. And to some extent, our reaction and those of the other major countries may have an impact on how he decides to run things.

But I think we did have an impact, and typically a quiet impact not well noticed. Behind the scenes, the United States played a large role in the privatization and Russian small business generation. We played a large role in helping the Russians draft their first laws on what private property means and helping them draft a tax code. One has to remember that in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, they had exactly nothing in terms of a foundation for erecting a free market system--no stock market, no concept of securities, no concept of the right place of interest, no property laws, no nothing whatsoever and not the memory of it, because anyone who knew how these things were done had long since perished in Russia.

So all that had to be put down, and the consequences are slow to be seen, but they are there and they are playing their way out, and one of those consequences is simply this. The Communist Party of Russia is not a factor in our calculations. Whatever Putin is about, it is not about the restoration of communism. They are someplace else. What he is about is a reform agenda that sounds very much like it was written at the University of Chicago, actually.

MR. BROOKS: As a graduate, I can tell you that's the scariest words I've heard all day.

[Laughter.]

MR. FUERTH: It could well be, and I want to get my last two cents in here. There were also commissions much less well known for South Africa, for Ukraine--they are still in existence and still functioning--for Egypt, for Kazakhstan, and an environment and energy forum with the Chinese, and the Vice President has been the primary U.S. Government partner in each one of those.

MR. BROOKS: Before we get to audience questions, I just want to ask one quick question related to Russia, not so much on the substance of the policy but on how the decision making process and how Gore works with the State Department, and this is really for Carla and Doyle, I guess, because we have a reasonably strong State Department policy toward Russia, Strobe Talbott.

I was going to ask you, how has the Vice President worked with the NSC and especially the State Department over the past number of years, and I ask this particularly because one of the things we've learned and that you both have talked about is the enormous discretion that the Vice President's office has had. Policy making as President is a much broader sphere. There are millions of people around town who want to be involved in the process. That, by necessity, can't be as discrete and as closely held as apparently the decision-making has been up to now.

How have his relations with the State Department been? How much has he run, say, the Russia policy? How much has the State Department run it? What's the state of play on that?

MR. McMANUS: Actually, it appears to have been quite good, but his relationship with the State Department really boils down to one simple question and that's his relationship with Strobe Talbott, and in my view, the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission, which is very interesting and the other commissions are very interesting exercises and were worth much more ink than we gave to them, was a very nifty way to solve the eternal problem of what the appropriate role for a Vice President in foreign policy making would be.

Subcontracting Russia policy to the Vice President would have raised all kinds of terrible organizational and managerial and political issues. At various points along the way, we could see as through a glass darkly evidence that he was certainly involved in the discussions, but Strobe Talbott was running it.

MS. ROBBINS: I have been amazed at how involved, actually, the Vice President and, from my understanding, what Leon has been involved, because so much got focused around these meetings and for problems to be solved the way we used to think of summits that, particularly proliferation questions and all that, whenever I heard about big things going on, I always heard, well, Leon was in the room for this as well as that's the subject we're going to deal with in that next meeting.

So it became less, because the meetings became less and less frequent between Yeltsin and Clinton, I think a lot of it was focused on those twice-a-year meetings on solving a lot of bilateral issues. So I think actually remarkably involved, from my reading of it.

MR. BROOKS: Jim Woolsey, you looked like--did you want to say something on--

MR. WOOLSEY: No, that's all right.

AUDIENCE QUESTIONS

MR. DIONNE: Mary McGrory?

MS. McGRORY: Thank you very much. I would like to ask a question about today. We've talked a lot about yesterday and a lot about tomorrow. I would like to know how each member of the panel feels about the visit of Kim Dae Jung to North Korea and what impact it might have, if any, on plans to build a nuclear missile defense, which started out with the fear of a North Korean, I guess hydrogen bomb or something, something very bad.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: Steve?

MR. SOLARZ: If skepticism is the tribute which hope pays to experience, there is every reason to be skeptical about the consequences of the current summit which is taking place. I don't mean to in any way diminish the potential significance of this encounter. It does represent, after all, Mary, the first time in half a century that the leaders of the two Koreas have met. The mood music emanating from Pyongyang does seem to be encouraging.

But we know from history that there have been a whole series of North-South encounters, albeit not at the level of chief of state. There have been a whole series of agreements, none of which have ever been implemented. We're dealing with a government in North Korea which is by far the most repressive regime in the world. It hasn't hesitated to engage in the most blatant acts of terrorism in the past. It was hell-bent to develop nuclear weapons. It's presumably still working on its missile program. It maintains a huge and formidable army, forward deployed along the 38th parallel.

I certainly hope that this summit will result in a reduction of tensions on the Korean peninsula, perhaps even some humanitarian agreements which help to soften the consequences of the divide of the peninsula, but based on past experience, the proof will have to be in the pudding and I would not assume that this represents the end of a threat from North Korea.

Finally, let me say that although nothing has yet come out in the press about discussions that have been taking place, I would anticipate that at some point during the course of this summit, Kim Jong Il will put forward the old North Korean demand that all American troops be withdrawn from South Korea, which I trust will be rejected by Kim Dae Jung. But I believe that that remains one of the fundamental objectives of the North Koreans.

As for the potential missile threat which it poses to the United States, I think it would be entirely premature, based on whatever happens in the next couple of days, to conclude that we don't face such a threat for all the reasons that I've mentioned. Even if there's some kind of a verbal or even written agreement that appears to deal with it, when one considers all the previous written agreements that the North never implemented, one would have to be very cautious in concluding that this is no longer a problem.

MR. DIONNE: Jim Woolsey, you wanted to say something?

MR. WOOLSEY: Yes. I share Steve's skepticism and sense of caution. I'd just add a couple of points. It is possible this could be the beginning of a warming of relations, and obviously we ought to take advantage of it if it is the case with North Korea, first of all, between North and South Korea, and perhaps later with us. But to my mind, for the reasons Steve mentioned and others, it does not affect or should not affect the United States' convictions about the importance of ballistic missile defense.

In late 1995, and I hasten to say I resigned from the government in early 1995, the National Intelligence Council put out a very poor estimate on ballistic missile threats to the United States that effectively ignored the fact that Alaska and Hawaii were parts of the United States, that rogue nations might cooperate among themselves and get foreign assistance in producing ballistic missiles, and the like.

After the Rumsfeld Commission, on which I serve, reported in mid-1998, within a month, what I think Ms. McGrory was referring to, the North Koreans tested a three-stage missile, the Taipodong, and it's interesting to note that they deployed their medium-range missile, the Nodong, after only one test. So if your weapons, your ballistic missile weapons, are blackmail weapons, you do not have to operate to the degree of safety and security and reliability standards that the United States, or for that matter the old Soviet Union, operated in designing systems.

Moreover, the newer intelligence community estimates suggest that first Iran and then Iraq are coming along, one likely, one possible within the next 15 years with intercontinental ballistic missiles, and behind them are lots of little rogue states--Libya, Syria, et cetera--working on ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

So I don't think this problem is going to go away because of a good summit or even a change in relations with North Korea. I'm not a fan of the Clinton administration's ballistic missile defense system. I think boost phase intercept is going to be absolutely essential, but that's a question for another day.

MR. DIONNE: Could I, before I turn to another question, I wanted to ask Doyle, I wanted to bring it back to Al Gore. I was talking to some diplomats, well-informed diplomats from a friendly country who were talking about how difficult it is to understand the structure of foreign policy making, foreign policy inside the Gore campaign, that the Bush people have a very sort of clear line of authority. Now, some of that obviously is that Al Gore has our whole government standing behind him and Bush has had to build a kind of government-in-waiting down in Austin.

What is your sense of how decisions get made within the Gore circle and do you want to tick off a number of people who might run this thing for Gore, you know, Solarz, Woolsey, Bumpers?

MR. McMANUS: I am precisely the wrong person at this table to answer that question, but I will imagine--I will pretend that I am Leon Fuerth and answer it--

MR. FUERTH: I guess you wouldn't answer it.

[Laughter.]

MR. McMANUS: --answer it as I might to the shaving mirror in the morning.

MR. DIONNE: He has a beard, so--

[Laughter.]

MR. McMANUS: That's an improbability to what exponent?

Having prepared for this meeting by reading all of the Vice President's recent foreign policy speeches, he labors in this campaign under the severe handicap of being the sitting member of an administration and the speeches read as though they were cleared by a bureaucracy.

Let me just speculate for 30 seconds on who might be in the next administration. Secretary of Defense Woolsey is--

MR. WOOLSEY: Admirals can't be Secretaries of Defense.

MR. McMANUS: Disqualified by his recent uniformed service. Every reporter in town is a partisan of Dick Holbrook for Secretary of State for purely self-interested reasons. Again, this is a non-partisan issue. And every reporter in town deeply fears that Leon will be National Security Advisor because of the competence and discipline he will bring to the task.

[Laughter.]

MR. BROOKS: Norm?

MR. ORNSTEIN: Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and the Transition of Governing Project. The next President is going to face a Congress with partisan margins in the low single digits, whichever side wins, deep internal animosities and sharp ideological divisions, and with its own episodic involvement in foreign affairs.

Let me ask, I guess first Senator Bumpers and Congressman Solarz, do you have any sense of how Al Gore, with long experience in the House, the Senate, and, of course, as President of the Senate, would deal with this Congress in these areas? Would it be any different from the way in which President Clinton has? How would he deal with major foreign policy decision makers like Jesse Helms, Tom DeLay, and Chris Smith?

And then I'd like to ask a question in a related vein to Leon Fuerth, getting back to one of the questions David asked that didn't quite get answered, which is about the first 100 days. As a strategy for dealing with the Congress and with his own priorities, would you imagine that a President Gore would first put forward a fast track trade authority proposal and make that a high priority in his first 100 days? In terms of getting more money for foreign affairs, would he make this a major priority and try and get a commitment, which has not been forthcoming from appropriators or Congressional leaders in this area?

And would a President Gore do what a candidate Bush has done, which is to say that he would try very hard to secure a commitment and work on his own behalf to get his top decision makers in place and confirmed at an extremely early stage? How high a priority would he place on that?

MR. BROOKS: Why don't we go to the Congressional.

MR. BUMPERS: Well, let me just say first, Norm, that there is a perquisite that--let me put it a different way. There's another question that has to be answered before you can answer that one and that is it depends on whether you have a Democratic or a Republican Congress. If Jesse Helms is not chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, then Al Gore's job will be infinitely easier.

If he is still chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, the one thing about Gore is he is one of the most tenacious people I've ever known. Now, he's not going to go over there and ask for more foreign aid because he's setting himself up for a defeat and he certainly doesn't want to do that in the first 100 days or the first six months. Even though that would--in my opinion, if it's a Democratic House, he will, but he's not going to set himself up for a fight that he's going to lose and therefore be seen as a loser.

But he understands the legislative process. He knows all the people over there on a first-name basis. He is incredibly patient in dealing with these knotty problems. At times, you know, the Congress is just so--it's like trying to herd fleas into a bottle. You've got so many different people with different viewpoints on this, it takes a lot of time.

But going back to it, I think it depends more on the makeup of Congress, and if Jesse Helms is still chairman, obviously Al Gore's foreign policy is going to have to be molded to some extent to accommodate that. I think that's tragic, but true.

MR. SOLARZ: I think, Norm, that both Vice President Gore and Governor Bush, depending on who's elected, face both a tremendous challenge and a tremendous opportunity in terms of their relations with the Congress. The challenge and the opportunity, one and the same, are to recreate the basis for a more enduring bipartisan American foreign policy.

I think it's fairly clear that the current President has, in essence, lost the confidence of a good part of the Congress, certainly among the Republicans in the Congress, and there are times when one thinks that virtually any initiate that the President might propose will automatically be opposed by a number of Republicans in the House and Senate because they don't trust him and they don't have confidence in him.

I think Vice President Gore understands very well that foreign policy in a democracy like ours cannot possibly succeed over the long run without the support of the Congress, and while I've never met him, from what I've read, I have the impression based on his conduct of the governorship of Texas that Governor Bush understands the importance of bipartisan support, as well.

So I think if the Vice President wins, one of the first orders of business that he will face, which I would certainly hope he would address himself to, is what needs to be done to reach out, even if the Democrats are in the majority, to the Republicans in the Congress.

Particularly if the Republicans should keep control of the majority in the Senate and the House, as well, I think the Vice President would be very well advised to consider bringing some prominent Republicans into his administration in key national security and foreign policy positions. Similarly, I think if Governor Bush is elected, it would be in his interest to bring some Democrats in, because I think that is one way to create a sense of trust and confidence on the part of members of the opposition party in the intentions of the President.

Franklin Roosevelt used this technique to great advantage during the Second World War, and I think that the absence of a sense of comity between the parties and the President and the Congress, particularly on foreign policy issues, has been a great handicap which we've faced over the last several years and it needs to be addressed by whoever is elected President.

MR. DIONNE: The former Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn will be at a meeting of Bush advisors being held here in the next session.

[Laughter.]

MR. FUERTH: E.J., I'm afraid I've intervened for an answer which will be, possibly from your point of view, a non-answer. The last thing that somebody like me should do is publicly prescribe what should be in Al Gore's 100 days. I can only say that what will happen is an orderly process in which the total objectives of the administration are on the table. His foreign policy and national security are not the only parts of the agenda. There's a huge agenda for the American people in there and what you are trying to figure out in your list of priorities is the total agenda. After all, it's playing to the same political system, through the same sets of brains and intellects and interests in the Congress, and in effect, you have to budget the available energy that you get against your targets.

I do know that he believes that the early part of the new administration is the time to make the most important choices clear, because as things go on, the friction begins to take over and subtracts from the burst of momentum that you get having just emerged victorious in an election. But that's as far as I can go in describing what the first 100 days would look like.

I also agree that one should hope for a reestablishment of a cooler atmosphere between the parties, but I qualify this in one respect. We all know very well the kinds of problems that the administration has had with the Congress, but there has been a kind of revolutionary fervor at times within the Republican Party that has not typified it always and in the past.

One question here, regardless of whether--of who maintains control of the House and the Senate, is will that mood temper with experience and make it possible for any new President to approach the Congress with well-considered policies and hope to have them received in an open-minded way.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. There were a number of questioners. Marvin has been very patient, Bill Niskanen. What I may do is have Marvin and Bill Niskanen, who had their hands up for a long time, ask questions, and then maybe we can bundle a few questions together because I know there are folks all over the room who want to get in. But Marvin, go ahead.

MR. KALB: I'm Marvin Kalb with the Shorenstein Center at Harvard and my question is primarily to Leon Fuerth. You mentioned earlier a series of navigational points, and then you identified some of those navigational points--terrorism, trade, drugs, Putin, name them.

Not too long ago, we had the ability of seeing foreign policy as the result of some large conceptual vision of America's role in the world, and I'm wondering if you feel that that time is gone, when one can no longer, given the different kinds of problems you've identified, come up with one of those large embracing conceptual ideas to define American foreign policy, or is it simply that you haven't, you, generically the government now, come up with that kind of consideration as yet and result, if you follow me?

MR. FUERTH: Yes, I do follow you.

MR. KALB: Okay. Thank you very much.

MR. FUERTH: There's an interesting tension between an announcement every four years that a new administration has a brand new reconceptualization of America's role in the world on foreign policy and the certain knowledge that, in another four years, that administration and its grand conceptualization may completely pass from the scene. It lends to the process of grand architecture a certain temporary quality and ought to inspire a degree of humility among anyone--among any persons who think that it is possible to construct foreign policy for the ages. In human affairs, ten years is an eternity, and something that has lasted, let's say, for a generation is a remarkable accomplishment.

So if you ask me, I would say that the more enduring navigation points in American foreign policy, the ones that you will find present from one administration to the next, over longer periods of American history, are moral or ethical and they derive from a single sentence, which is because to us much is given, therefore, from us much is expected. And I believe that most Americans are raised with that understanding of the equation in life and that it informs their attitude over a long period of time towards the kinds of sacrifices that different kinds of presidents facing different kinds of problems have asked them to accept.

After that, it becomes a question of specific details, but there are not too many people on the face of the globe who ever had that feeling about themselves in relation to the rest of the people on the planet. And so if you ask me what is the foundation, I would say that attitude in the people of the country is the foundation. Everything else is detail.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. Bill?

MR. Niskanen: Bill Niskanen, the CATO Institute. President Clinton initiated the bombing of Serbia without the approval of either Congress or the Security Council. Would a President Gore interpret Presidential discretion in the same way?

MR. FUERTH: The Vice President believes that President Clinton was on perfectly sound constitutional grounds in his approach to that decision.

MR. DIONNE: Maybe we can pull some folks together. Who's got the mike? These two gentlemen here, and then a couple folks in the back, and then we'll move over to this side. But maybe both of you could put together some questions.

MR. : [Indiscernible] Central News Agency, Taiwan. With the tensions in the Korean peninsula apparently easing, the other serious flash point seems to lie in the Taiwan Strait. The question that I'd like to put to the panelists is should and would a Gore administration play a more active role in the cross-strait situation, that is, the situation between Taiwan and China, and would a Gore administration do something specifically to try to bring the two leaders, the leaders of both sides, to come together? Thank you.

MR. DIONNE: Sir, if you want to--

MR. : Yes. This is directed primarily to Steven Solarz and Leon Fuerth. At APAC and again at WINEP, the Vice President and also Texas Governor Bush already dealt with the problem of Iraq, I believe, so there is no need to return to that question. However, in the forward yesterday, there was a report on a Lebanon study group, I believe Jeane Kirkpatrick of AEI was a member of that. It called for whatever means are necessary to get Syria out of Lebanon. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that.

MR. SOLARZ: I think the decision by Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon will over time focus not only more attention on the Syrian presence in Lebanon but also more pressure on the Syrians to withdraw from Lebanon. And I think we all want to look forward to this day when there can be a Lebanon for the Lebanese. I was in Beirut a few years ago, and in the course of the discussion with one of the leading Lebanese intellectuals, I asked him whether the Syrians actually had any political prisoners in Lebanon. He said, only three: the president, the prime minister, and the speaker of the Parliament. Obviously, Lebanon at the moment is a fully owned and operated subsidiary of Syria. But I have to say, in terms of the various challenges we face in the Middle East, in terms of some order of priorities, there are some other things that come first. One is trying to move forward the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Another I think is to try to facilitate a resumption of the Syrian-Israeli talks. Obviously a lot will depend on whether Bashar Assad consolidates his position and is then willing to move forward. But I think those are issues that really come first, as does, in my judgment, the continuing challenge of figuring out a way to bring about a change in the regime in Iraq. It is true that regime change is the stated objective of our policy. That was reaffirmed by the Vice President, stated by the President, signed the Iraq Liberation Act which was passed by the Congress. But the truth of the matters is that we don't yet appear to have a strategy for achieving that objective, and my concern is that when the United States states an objective of its policy but then does nothing as a practical matter to bring it about, it inevitably erodes and diminishes our credibility because everyone in the Middle East hears us say that our objective is to bring about a change in the regime but there isn't one among them that has the vaguest idea of how we plan to go about it and they don't think we're serious about it. I don't think that's healthy for the United States.

I would much prefer to see a strategy designed to bring about a change in the regime, but I have to say that if it's impossible to come up with one or if we're not willing to pay the price, which is perhaps the more accurate way of putting it, of what bringing down Saddam would require, then we might well be better off with a policy of containment which makes no pretense about trying to change the regime but focuses on keeping it in its box, as it were.

So yes, we ought to hope and work to the day when Syrians withdraw from Lebanon, but I see a whole range of other problems in the region, which ought to get first claim on our attention.

MR. DIONNE: Leon Fuerth, on either liberating Lebanon or ending the conflict in the Taiwan Straits.

MR. FUERTH: I think the answer on Lebanon was ample and good, so I won't add to it.

As for the Taiwan Straits, I think the most important thing is for the United States to maintain stability and predictability in its approach to the issue, because if we have to continue to make it clear that we adhere to the doctrinal lines that have been laid down for several administrations now about one China, we need to continue to make it clear that we strongly urge the parties to find a way to deal with the question of the future of Taiwan by peaceful means. And to the extent that we carry a big stick, we have to speak softly.

MR. BUMPERS: Leon, if I may, you just used the word, by peaceful means, and I can tell you, in visiting with Chinese leaders about a month ago, they want Taiwan to have their own economy, they are willing for them to have their own military forces, they are willing to have almost everything, and they said that the Taiwanese and the Chinese could work this out except for one thing, and that is the United States continues to use the word, we want this resolved in a peaceful way. And they say, as long as we continue to say that, Taiwan is going to remain intransigent in their approach to this. So that's the way they see it, for whatever it's worth.

MR. DIONNE: We had some questions here, and could I ask, this is a great panel to talk about any foreign policy issue, but it would be good if the questions focused on how Al Gore would govern. In the back?

MR. GRABER: I'm Howie Graber [ph.], formerly with Naval Intelligence. I'd like to ask, forgetting the legality of the Kosovo decision by Mr. Clinton, what is the wisdom when, after the debacle of Somalia intervention and Haiti, one wonders, and now in Russia it is quoted that when Mr. Clinton started, 70 to 80 percent favored the United States. Now, 70 to 80 percent are deeply suspicious. And the same is true of China and India and others as being looked on as a bully.

We did kill only 15--no, 7,000 to 8,000 with badly wounding another 7,000 or 8,000, many children. Is this a real wise decision to intervene without the advice of Congress or the United Nations, both of which Mr. Bush, the senior Mr. Bush, had in the event of Kuwait?

MR. FUERTH: Well, sir, I find your question to be a nested set of assumptions and distortions, and that makes it difficult for me to deal with it adequately in the time available. But my basic response is this. At the point of intervention, Milosevic was seeing to the evisceration of Kosovo. There were scores of thousands of refugees fleeing the country and becoming a caseload on the hands of poor surrounding states ill-equipped to handle that kind of burden.

If the United States and NATO had simply sat still and watched him carry this out, I think we simply would have disgraced ourselves and eliminated ourselves and NATO as a persuasive factor in the future of European security. There are moments, which are definitive when they test the principles of a country or of an alliance and this was one, and the response was warranted and successful.

MR. GRABER: Does this not apply to Chechnya?

MR. BROOKS: Why don't we cut it off there and go to another question on Al Gore.

MR. DIONNE: The gentleman right in front, and then we'll spread it around, oh, and then over here. Sorry.

MR. : Mr. Fuerth made the very interesting statement that history would judge the premises underlying the Clinton foreign policy, and it was plural premises and the word "history" indeed was a part of it, and you indicated that Mr. Gore would follow those same premises. Now, in answering Mr. Kalb's question, you put one navigation point forward, which was one of spirit, beyond the issues that you enumerated as navigation points earlier.

My question is, in your mind, what are those premises underlying the conception of the Clinton-Gore foreign policy which history is going to judge, and maybe to make it simple, you could just note the principles concerning international order and perhaps global governance. Thank you.

MR. FUERTH: I think that the Clinton-Gore administration realized, first of all, that it was a misnomer to think that we were in the post-Soviet period. With each passing year, the relevance of describing ourselves as being in the post-Soviet era diminished. I think that the administration correctly understood that we were in the opening years of the global period and it has sought to deal with many of the issues that I mentioned earlier, and in many cases has laid an extremely successful foundation for further action.

I think that the decisions that have brought about our prosperity have also changed the global perspective. American economic strength is the first fact of international affairs, not just the first fact of our domestic affairs. It represents a transformation in the capacity of the United States to deal with oncoming events. We have used that strength to prevent the collapse of the Mexican economy, an act of real vision and real statecraft, directed towards a completely different perspective about the importance of Latin America towards the United States.

We have, wherever possible, tried to break out of the shell of inherited attitudes and policies towards the hemisphere, towards Africa, towards Russia, towards China, towards the impoverished billions of the world, towards cooperation with international institutions. So I do think that history will regard the aspirations and the efforts and the accomplishments of the Clinton-Gore period favorably and I think it will also discover that there is an interlogic pursued pretty faithfully from one end to the other.

If you are looking for absolute plan, if you are looking for absolute rigidity of approach, you won't find it, but you will find a search for practical methods that work when directed against strategic objectives, and what history will have to judge is how well have they worked.

MR. DIONNE: Jim Woolsey, do you have a thought on that?

MR. WOOLSEY: I think Leon states this very well. In a lot of the issues that are going to have to be decided, where to intervene, for example, they are going to be ad hoc decisions based in part on allied support, in part on logistics, in part on the degree of humanitarian disaster. And it is difficult to find any sort of single guiding principle.

I think that on this issue, as Leon said in response to an earlier question on the same general subject, that the principle of those to whom much has been given, much will also be demanded of them, seems to me to be a reasonable proposition for the United States to follow, and beyond that, in trying to set out themes, whether it's competitive engagement or conciliatory engagement or whatever and to derive there from the proposition that one would, therefore, intervene in X situation but not in Y, is really kind of a game. It's just not one that is going to get you anywhere.

On matters of that sort in foreign policy, I really rather align myself with the view of Justice Oliver Wendell Homes, which he once said that mankind was born to formulate general propositions and none of them was really ever worth a damn.

[Laughter.]

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. There are two questioners who have been very patient here, please, and then we'll go to sort of any closing comments that people want to make. Please?

MR. BROSAN: Woody Brosan [ph.] of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and Leon, this is a process question. Once before one of Reagan's summits, he had laid out--Gore had laid out in his office on a table a series of yellow legal pads sort of diagramming the results that might come out of the summit, and if one thing happened, it went this way, if one thing happened, it went another way. It sort of looked like a reverse NCAA pool.

My question is, does he still do that, and if not, could you kind of describe what he does sort of in a formal way to try to figure out the future?

MR. FUERTH: It's an interesting process because he has a lot of gifts as an individual. He is extremely well informed, sucks up information, forgets little, puts me continuously at a disadvantage because I often forget what I've said but he never forgets what I've told him and I'm frequently confronted with the record of my own advice, good or bad, thinks broad but then loves the details, will on occasion start trying to diagram a sequence of events, not because in the end you can make history dance this way, but because it helps to begin to at least play with the possibilities, to lay them out on a sheet of paper, to invite others to comment on what might happen and to refine a sense of how different events impact one on the other and what you might possibly do about them.

He looks for inspiration not only in facts and analysis but also in metaphor and in the language itself. It's a very probing process and if I'm worried about anything, should he become President, it's that the pressures of the office may diminish the opportunity for that kind of discussion.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. This gentleman?

MR. : Thank you. I just had a quick question, picking up on Mr. Fuerth's recent comment on the administration's involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean and just to ask the panel whether it could describe for us how a President Gore might approach the issue of hemispheric relations, what might be the priorities in developing that relationship and would it be characterized by continuity or new initiative.

MR. FUERTH: There's a silence here, but I'm silent because you addressed the question to the panel and so I'm waiting to see whether any one of the folks on the panel wish to respond.

MR. : We're waiting for you.

MR. : Yes, we're waiting for you.

[Laughter.]

MR. FUERTH: That's what I thought, but--

MR. DIONNE: See, you've got to get used to this now.

[Laughter.]

MR. FUERTH: You know, the Vice President went to Mexico City in order to propose that there be a hemispheric summit. He was one of the first people in the administration to propound the idea that there should be such a summit, and the purpose of that summit was to crack the mold again, to change the perception that many of us have about what is going on in Latin America and to change Latin American perceptions about what we represent.

He recognizes the obvious statistics, that the hemisphere is the biggest single economic partner we're going to have. He recognizes the cultural fact, that the United States has evolved into a nation which is also, in part, Hispanic in its roots and that this is going to have profound implications for us. He urged during the campaign that the campaign agree to support NAFTA, and he took the risk of debating NAFTA without safety nets, because if it had gone the other way, it would have gone very badly for the Vice President's reputation, because he believes that, for all of its problems, the hemisphere is a place where part of our destiny is going to be formed, and I would expect him to work intensely with the hemispheric leaders to keep going in the direction they've already pledged to go in the course of the various summit meetings.

MR. DIONNE: Could I just say, before we close, I want to thank Woody for a suggestion that will massively increase public interest in foreign policy, foreign policy as an NCAA pool. Maybe Al Gore knows something we don't know.

I also want to thank Leon for the phrase, "a nest of assumptions and distortions," which I hope to use on the first chance I get in an argument with David.

And lastly, I want to thank our whole panel--

MR. FUERTH: I have to apologize to the individual I nuked with that response. It was more my frustration at not having the time to peel away the different layers of the question, so I beg your pardon.

MR. DIONNE: I figured it was all in good fun.

And lastly, I want to just read one brief thing about Mr. Fuerth. In a recent New York Times piece, he once said his goal was to remain nameless, faceless, and odorless and that his ideas belong to the Vice President, and I'm very grateful that he could share some of them with us today, at the risk of losing some of those other qualities. Thank you very much.

Norm?

MR. ORNSTEIN: Thanks. To turn a phrase around, from this panel, much was expected and to us much has been given, and I want to thank you all, and that includes something given to this range of C-SPAN viewers that we've learned today includes Saddam Hussein.

[Laughter.]

MR. : Welcome.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Yes. Maybe that will bring him into the community of nations.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: This has been the fifth in a series of sessions that we've held on how candidates would govern, the first in a new series. The next one, the sixth and the second, respectively, will take place at ten o'clock on the morning of the 22nd of this month. It will be on how would George W. Bush govern in foreign policy. We have a panel, which will have equally high expectations and we hope will deliver in the same way. That will include Bob Zoellick, serving as a key foreign policy advisor to Governor Bush, Georgie Anne Geyer, and a number of others.

I want to thank a number of people, the panelists and our moderators, known in different places as the Regis and Kathie Lee of questioners, the Hope and Crosby, the Huntley and Brinkley, and we will think of others by the next time, as well, but have done their usual superb job; the Pew Charitable Trusts, which funds our project and which has, of course, funded this series; John Fortier, who worked tirelessly to put this together and who coined the original idea; Christian Cook and Melissa Knauer and, of course, my colleague, Tom Mann.

Finally, let me just say, to reiterate a general theme, we focus in campaigns these days, and as we have for a long time, on the micro details of the policy positions of candidates and on questions of character, but generally the focus on questions of character has come down to what illicit substances they might or might not have ingested over the course of the last 20, 30, or 40 years, rather than, as Leon Fuerth put it, the habits of thought or the elements of character that really ground decision making and the ability to govern.

We do not or haven't as much focused either on how those issue positions and elements of character fit into a larger context, how one views even issues where we see distinct differences, like, as Jim Woolsey suggested, missile defense, will play out and actually be implemented into policy in a context very different from a campaign.

What we've tried to do today and in these sessions, what we'll try to do in our future sessions is to shed some light on that larger governing context, raise the appropriate questions of character, and put issue positions into a context, look at the experiences of the candidates, and look at the kind of political policy environment they will face.

There are some differences when it comes to foreign policy, including governing style, from others. You deal with a different set of actors. So we need to focus on what can work and what won't and what will play out in these areas.

These sessions, I believe, have shed a good deal of light, but they're only the beginning and I once again urge the journalists, the other political actors in this process, and voters to focus on and ask these questions because they're the vital ones as we go through this campaign and as we move past the campaign to a new President-elect and a transition and a first 100 days that themselves become critical to how we'll move forward as a nation.

I thank you all. We will see you on the 22nd.

[Applause.]

[Whereupon, the proceedings were adjourned.]