Pod Save the World - John Kerry: Recording for Duty

Episode Date: September 19, 2018

Tommy (with an assist from Jon Favreau) talks with former Secretary of State John Kerry about Iran, Israel, Trump's attacks and what he learned from the 2004 presidential campaign about how to respond to fake news.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. Thank you guys for tuning in. As always, not to brag, but this week I have my second former Secretary of State on the podcast. You don't see a lot of secretaries to state on some of the other cricket media pods looking at you. You love it. Although that would be good. Anyway, it was a lot of fun.

Secretary Kerry was here in Los Angeles. He arrived as President Trump was attacking him via Twitter. So we talked about that. We talked about his new book, Every Day is Extra. We talked about all the work. he did when he was secretary from Israel to the Iran deal and everything in between. We also talked about politics. John Favre and I did the interview together, and you might have heard a clip of it on Pate of America,

but we talked about the 2004 campaign and what he learned from that experience, because it really was a precursor to the kind of lies and distortions and fake news that have just become the norm. So without further ado, here is the conversation. You'll hear both me and John Favro asking questions, and I really think you guys will enjoy it. I guess the first question is, lucky you, President Trump has decided to start tweeting at you. I think he knows you have a book out. That's quite just going to help me enormously. Yeah, he really wants people to read your book.

So he tweeted, he's criticizing your meetings with the Iranian officials and suggesting they were illegal. Wondering aloud if you were registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is a law. We know he doesn't understand because he hired Michael Flynn and he hired Paul Manafort. What do you think about these tweets? What's he doing here? Well, it's the great Trump distraction. I mean, we know that he isn't going to read my book. I mean, I thought today, if they want to hide documents from him, they should put it in my book because he'll never read it. I mean, the guys, you know, comes from a different place. It's a distraction on the day that Paul Manafort cops a plea. And I tweeted back. I said, Mr. President, the conversation you really ought to be worried about is the one that took place between Manafort and Mueller. Yeah, right. So we are where we are.

Who you've known for what, since high school? Yeah, yeah, I knew Bob Mueller. Bob Mueller was captain in my hockey team. He was a terrific athlete, best athlete really in school. He was, we played soccer, hockey and lacrosse together for four years. Wow. Yeah, that's fun. Donald Trump is a, he likes to pick the wrong fights.

He used to shred the defense. Yeah. I know it's exactly what he's doing now. Right. Yeah, that's right. There you go. So, you know, he's criticizing you for your continued efforts to talk to the Iranians. The irony is they're not continued.

Okay. No. From the moment the president has made his decision by his doing it, I haven't met with anybody regarding that. People come and meet, and we meet normally, and of course it's a subject of conversation. It's always going to be. So I'm not defensive in the least about it. At the time that I met, it was at the United Nations General Assembly. I mean, you know, outside.

but that was the occasion that brought him to the United States. He met with countless numbers of people. I mean, he met with the, he formally delivered a address at the Council on Foreign Relations. He went to the media, went everywhere. And I met with him in the Munich Security Conference. I met with him in Oslo, Norway, at a peace conference where people were talking about how you make the world safer. So I will always meet with people to talk about how you avoid a war in the Middle East and how you make this country of ours safer.

And that's really what's going on. but nothing unusual. I mean, Henry Kissinger has spent four decades now, meeting with the Chinese, meeting with the Russians, meeting with people in various places in the world. This is the normal thing that senators, congressmen, ex-Senators, congressmen, who are engaged in public affairs do.

We have conversations with other people. And by the way, the administration should have more of them. Yeah, they should start. I mean, look, I'm defensive of the Iran deal because I believe it made us safer. You painstakingly negotiated this thing spending, weeks at a time, locked in hotel conference rooms with Iranian counterparts. You did it with a broken leg. I mean, what did you learn about your interlocutors, the Iranians, when you did this?

And what has your response been to their efforts to tear up this deal? Well, look, we all, in time you know this, you know these issues. We're all troubled by Iran's role in the region. We're troubled by their support for Hezbollah. We're troubled by their threats against Israel. We're troubled by their trafficking arms to Yemen. We're troubled by their meddling in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and so forth. So there are issues to resolve with Iran. But our calculation, President Obama's calculation, first of all, but the calculation of everybody in the administration was we are better off dealing with those issues if Iran isn't marching towards a nuclear weapon or doesn't have one. And so first step, get control of the nuclear process. Take that threat off

table, which is what we did. We also kept in place the sanctions for missiles, the sanctions for human rights, abuses, the sanctions for their trafficking and weapons, and we raised those sanctions during that period of time. So there was no inattention by the Obama administration to these issues. But we believe that you're going to have a better chance of advancing it if you build a relationship which holds them accountable to certain international standards. That's what happened, until Donald Trump alone just pulled out and guess what, left Europe, China, Russia, and Iran all trying to keep the agreement. So he thinks it's bad, but everybody else, you know, the major players who are involved in it think it's good and want to keep it.

Yeah, and he seems to be threatening them with the military action if they don't live up to terms. Well, but the real policy of this administration is obvious now. It is regime change. Right. They are trying to do regime change. And the bottom. The bottom line is we don't do that very well. How much of a cakewalk would a war with Iran be? What day would we be greeted as liberators? How quickly would we pay for the effort with their oil? It feels like it's obvious.

It's a no-brainer, right? It should be, but it obviously isn't because we have neocons who are back in who are pushing the idea that they're going to put so much pressure on them. They're going to cave. Here's what is going to happen. If they were to cave, if, and it's a huge if, because their view is we're untrustworthy now. We've proven it because of Donald Trump pulling away from the agreement.

So the idea of them coming back to the negotiating table is a pipe dream. It's not going to happen. So if you keep the pressure on, if there were to be a change, because of the dynamic Trump has set up by making Rouhani, President Rouhani look not credible because he negotiated with America and now he finds America bites them, you're not going to see an Iranian leader. negotiate with the United States for a long time.

Certainly not with Donald Trump. How much damage do you think Trump has done to America's reputation in the world, international institutions, and how difficult do you think it will be for the next president to sort of put it back together? I remember, you know, when Obama was running, a big theme was Bush has destroyed our reputation in the world, and then he became president, and, you know, the entire administration sort of got that back over eight painstaking years. But do you think it's been worse with Trump already?

No, I think, John, I think the leaders in the world are smart people. President Xi has been pursuing a new narrative, as has President Putin, that the liberal order of the West is failing, and that the United States is on a downward incline slide. And regrettably, Donald Trump is playing into that. His whole policy is playing into that. He's not making America first or stronger. He's making it alone and isolating us from our own allies, weakening the NATO alliance, weakening relationships with critical friends like Canada, Mexico, others. So we're in a much worse situation.

But those leaders, they read the anonymous op-ed. They're reading, I guarantee you they're going through every single page of Woodward's book right now. They're chronicling everything. And they know how flattery gets you somewhere with Donald Trump. They know. I mean, that's what Kim Jong-un did for the guy to say. Right. Psychological profiles are real short.

Now, oh, we're going to have a really glitzy fun meeting in Singapore. Oh, gee, we don't have a communique? Wow, that's really curious. And they're just, they don't have anything that came out of it. So now they're trying to figure out how do we make the next step. King John was played Robo dope and just, you know, ran circles around Donald Trump who liked the flags. He liked the meeting.

like these tension, but he didn't get any precision whatsoever as to what denuclearization is, no idea where their weapons are, no process by which we're going to learn that. There's no structure there. There's no there there. The leaders around the world see that. So the answer to your question is, I believe, a new president, particularly if it's a president who is expressing the need for U.S. leadership and the strengthening of NATO and the vitalization of U.N. and so forth. It'll happen so quickly. It'll turn around in a matter of months. And I think you'll see people rejoice that the United States is back. In addition to your negotiations with the Iranians, you spent a lot of time with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. For people

listening, he's a slick, smooth operator in D.C., fancy suits, you know, martini lunches. I'm just wondering what it's like to constantly... Not a labrov incident. He's a whiskey guy. Whiskey guy, sorry. Constantly negotiate with someone like him who, you know what they're doing. You know they're hacking our elections. You know they're lying to us about Syria. You know they're lying about Crimea.

But that's your guy. That's your interlocutor. How do you manage a relationship like that? You do it. I mean, it's not dissimilar from the politics of Capitol Hill where President Trump has to sit down with Mitch McConnell, who's declared that his one goal in life is to make the president a one-term president. I mean, come on. You learn, and it's a hard thing, and it's not the most glorious component of being in politics, but you learn how to compartmentalize. And we have to compartmentalize in big ways because Crimea, Ukraine, consistently remained a major problem in our relationship. And we were always fighting to get the Minsk agreement implemented. We were always fighting to get the little green men with no insignia out of the country as they deny they have them and so forth. It's laughable. away. I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of sick and pathetic, if you want to know the truth,

that they say the things they say. I mean, I had some non-conversations with Labrov some days. We're telling them what we know about the Assad chemical weapons, and he's sitting there on the other phone in a total other universe. It's just, it's bizarre, but you have to get through it, because you have to look for the places where you actually can find that they have an interest in wanting to cooperate or satisfy something. So we actually, I met with Putin many times. I saw Lavrov a lot, and we got things done. And when we got the Iran nuclear agreement done, Russia was actually very helpful.

They took on major responsibility on fuel and on the stockpile. And Lavrov was actually helpful in working the Iranians on certain issues where he said, you're not going to have our support on this. You've got to do this. You got to do that. they were supportive on climate change. They were supportive on the Rossi becoming, I got Putin, after 10 years of objections, I got him to lift his objection to making the Rossi in Antarctica,

the largest marine protected area in the world. And they were helpful on the airline reductions of emissions. And so, you know, we found that they were helpful. We would not have gotten the 1,300 tons of chemical weapons, declared chemical weapons out of Syria. Syria. And we knew they had some that were undeclared. And we started to go after those almost immediately afterwards. But we wouldn't have gotten 1,300 tons out of there without Russia telling Assad, this is happening. It's going to happen fast and here's how it happens. Now, Assad

lies to them too. Yeah. And he hid some weapons and so forth. But the fact is that if we hadn't done that, when ISIS ran across, when, you know, the Islamic State ran across the country, they would have had chemical weapons. Yeah, that was the horrible, horror. And if they They had chemical weapons. You'd have seen a whole different thing happening in Paris subway or London or wherever. So it is fortuitous. We got the result we got. What should the response have been from a Democratic president or a normal Republican president

to Russia's interference in the 2016 election? How do you balance the need to obviously respond to such an attack, but also not go so far as to have another sort of Cold War breakout? Well, I think the president actually managed that as carefully and effectively as you could under the circumstances. Because I remember, I don't know if the president knew sooner, but I don't think I learned about that kind of interference until the early summer, you know, very late spring, early summer of 2016. And then we had a series of meetings in the White House. It became the intelligence community laid it out very clearly to us. But here's the problem.

President Obama knew this was important to get the American people to understand. And he tried to get Mitch McConnell and the leaders to buy in to a unified Republican Democrat, everybody, House, Senate, White House, all putting this out to the American people. And why was that so critical? Because Trump was already laying the seeds and the groundwork for the notion that the election was bogus. He was constantly talking about it's rigged, it's rigged, it's rigged, it's rigged. And if we didn't have Republicans and leadership joining in that statement, Americans would have said, here comes a game. And Trump would have said it. Trump would have leapt all over it and said,

you're trying to interrupt the election. You're making an excuse for why things are screwed up. And so the president knew he couldn't be the vehicle of doing that. So he turned to the intel community and the director of national intelligence, the director of the CIA, and these guys went out and did put a statement out. Very careful. carefully crafted so it wasn't political. We couldn't scare people. And I remember when we were in China at the G20, before the elections, I think it was in August, late August, President Obama was extremely tough and very direct and clear in a one-on-one with the interpreter, but the one-on-one conversation with President Putin. And the WikiLeaks stuff was already out. And that continued

a little bit, we did not see new attacks and new efforts after that conversation took place. So in effect, it had effect, and then the minute the election was over, people from Russia were kicked out of the country, sanctions were raised, things took place. So I think it was a very tough situation where the president was, in a sense, trapped by not wanting to allow Donald Trump as a candidate to politicize the process. Republicans often take political actions that they claim are in the name of the troops. President Trump's favorite hobby is criticizing the posture of NFL players during the national anthem, but those voices are silent when he attacks the Khan family, a Gold Star family,

for example. You have dealt with this yourself. You've had all kinds of dishonest attacks about your military record. What should Democrats learn from your experience from the Trump attacks about how to fight back? You've got to answer it in every forum where it is. I mean, the mistake I made in 2004, it wasn't as clear, but we had a big fight in the campaign. There were a lot of people saying, look, you've won the battle of facts. Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, every major paper in the country has carried the facts. And we've talked to your crew.

They're all interviewed. We know what happened. The problem is that you could completely destroy their lie. You could shed all the truth on it. And the next day, they'd get up in the morning, go out and say the same thing. And they'd say it in a different audience, or they'd put him up on television ads, and it was the television ads that were the most damaging, I think, and our campaign, for a number of different reasons, the limits of money and so forth, didn't think that it was necessary to have those television ads. I thought it was, and I lost the battle of my own campaign, which is, frankly, there shouldn't have been a battle. I should have just stopped the campaign and said, this is what we're doing.

And I should have done what Obama did with Reverend Wright, which is go out and explain the war in Vietnam. and the context of where we were and what happened, and just put it in a different place. But you've got to answer TV with TV. You've got to do that. So I was on your 2004 campaign. I was just a kid then, 21 years old. I was there from the beginning.

Anybody listening needs to know he's just a kid. I'm still just a kid. I'm still just a kid. I always feel like one. And I was there from the beginning, and I always thought that at the beginning of that campaign in the primary, you had such a good sense of who you were, why you were running,

why you were running at that moment in time. And you told the story really well. I worked for Edwards. You kicked our ass. That's right. And then, you know, as the campaign went on, and we faced a lot of challenges, and then you got to the general,

and the campaign gets bigger, and there's more advisors added, and suddenly it's this big race, and you're going through. It seemed it sometimes like, you know, the message got lost a little bit, and that sort of core story you had at the beginning. I just wondered if what you ever,

I never knew what you thought. about that. I think that, you know, people gave me a lot of advice before I started running. And one of the things, Bill Clinton and different people said to me is, look, you can't be your own campaign manager. You got to trust the people you have with you. Yeah. And that was the tension. Because I had friends of mine, like Senator Bob Kerry and my great pal, Tom Vallee, who was in the Marines, and, you know, they understood it. And they were saying you got to do this. And we couldn't get the lay folks, so to speak, in terms of that to see it. But I take the blame. It's my fault. I mean, I'm the candidate. I'm the guy who ought to make the cut. I should have perhaps fired

somebody or done something, but I didn't. And I live with that. But it made me a very different secretary of state. It made me a very different candidate in re-election in Massachusetts. It made me a very different senator. I have never faltered for one instance since then in doing what I think is right and doing what's in my gut. And that's the important way to do it. That's why I write this book. Every day is extra. It's about how you live, how you tackle things, how you are in public life,

a life of purpose, what are you doing? And you've got to be true to yourself. Is that the advice you would give to a candidate running today? Like, what's the main piece of advice you'd give to a presidential candidate running? Well, the first thing, I'd tell them you can't run for president. You can't run a 50-state campaign unless you go out of the campaign. and finance structure. And I think it is probably true that we've seen the last candidacy within it. Because you just can't do it. I had to pull out of Colorado three weeks early. I had to pull out of

Virginia. I won Fairfax County in Virginia. First time any Democrat had won Fairfax County since Lyndon Johnson. And we came within a couple points in Virginia. We came with a couple points of Colorado. Even though we had no advertising for the last three weeks and we were getting the crap kicked out of us. So I would say you've got to go to the people, have a campaign that touches the folks and raises money and gets commitment or you just won't do it. Number one. Number two, yeah, you've got to just, you've got to have a clear, really clear rationale for why you're doing this and why it's different from other people and why you're going to be able to reach the American people with a message that matters to them that makes a difference to their lives. I mean, politics has really gotten stale, horrible in our country. And if you don't understand that the disillusionment is on the right, it's on the left, it's in the center, it's everywhere.

And the reason is Congress is dysfunctional. And people are tired of empty suits standing up and suits when I say that's men or women saying pablum, you know, that just doesn't make a difference. And people want to know they can trust somebody that you're really going to fight for the things that we need. the country has gotten more and more unfair. 52% of all the income of America goes to 1% of Americans. That's not sustainable over a long period of time. As a country, our democracy is not going to survive that way. And I think we've got to start talking much more realistically.

I just came from the Climate Action Summit in San Francisco. And I kind of let it rip in terms of laying out the truth of what's happening because all these climate things are going on and we're struggling. But we have a president who's pulled us out of the Paris Agreement. And we've lost momentum. And other leaders are looking at the problem now and seeing that maybe they don't have to tow the line as much as we're going to make them. And the absence of leadership is giving people an excuse to take easy roads away.

The problem with that is this is life and death climate. Literally life and death. I've been working at this issue for 30 plus years, whatever. And I will tell you that in Paris, we tried to hold the Earth's temperature to two degrees centigrade warming. The limits of what scientists say is where the tipping point is. Right now, as we all sit here, we're headed towards four degrees warming in this century. And so you look at the fires in California. You look at what's happening with the storms, the number of storms, the intensity of them.

Irma, the hurricane of year ago, Maria, the hurricane a year ago, and Harvey. Hurricane Urgo, cost us $265 billion. Cost the taxpayer in America, $265 billion. That is one-third of the Defense Department's budget. But it's also more money than the Commerce Department, the Education Department, the Labor Department, all of these departments, about six departments, get all together.

It's insanity where we are today. And Donald Trump, without any science, without any facts, walks away from this responsibility. We've got to bring young people to the table and bring people who are ready to go out and work like hell to elect people who are going to understand why they're there and be willing to fight for things that are real.

You know, I just don't know any other way to put it. It's key to us. It's key to the survival of our democracy, which, by the way, is really troubled right now. It's not working. It doesn't feel good. No. But the reason it's not working is so obvious.

There's too much money in American politics. The gerrymandering prevents genuine democracy and changeover within the Congress. And the people have changed. You have these people who are not interested in compromise or in making the place work. The rules of the Senate haven't changed, I tell people. It's the people who've changed. We have this conundrum now where, you know, Mitch McConnell and the Republicans for the last couple of years through the Obama presidency, you know, don't hold a hearing for a qualified

Supreme Court Judge because a Republican's not president, eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations, try to repeal Obamacare with a 50-vote threshold through reconciliation. What did Democrats do if we get back in power, knowing that there's probably almost nothing we can get done with a 60-vote threshold in the Senate, knowing that you have these Republicans who, for eight years of the Obama administration, said, we're not going to cooperate on anything. We're not going to do compromise. We're not going to do bipartisanship. our job is to defeat you.

Well, we have to call it out. We have to call it out, John, in ways that it wasn't called out previously. And we have to do the hard work of democracy. And when I talk about the book, when I go to various places now, and I talk about my life, I go back to my experience when I came back from Vietnam. The first thing I did was not actually demonstrate against the war. The first thing I did was become involved in Earth Day. and we brought 20 million Americans out of their homes on one single day. It was totally new and quite

stunning at that moment in time. But we didn't stop with people coming out of their home to make a demonstration. We made it a political movement that was focused on Congress. And we targeted the 12 worst votes in the House, labeled them the dirty dozen, went out with a major organizational effort, and we defeated seven of the 12. As you know, in politics, there was nothing like the defeat of your friends around you for the survivors to stiff in their spines, right? That's what happened. Past Clean Air Act, safe drinking water, marine mammal protection, coastal zone management. The EPA was created and signed into existence. America didn't even have an environmental protection agency until that happened, and Richard Nixon

signed it into law. And the reason was these things became voting issues. People didn't want to live next to a toxic waste site. People didn't want to, you know, have a water that made you sick or whatever. That has to happen. I don't know any other way to do it. I really don't. You have to organize. You know what our campaigns were like. Street for street, house for house. You got to bring people to the table, inspire them enough to believe they can make that difference and then go out and make the difference. The alternative is it just kind of crumbles. It falls apart. Do you think Democrats should get rid of the 60 vote threshold for Supreme Court nominations, keep it away for judges, try to use reconciliation, do some of the stuff that Republicans

have done so that we can pass the decision. I think the first thing you ought to do, the first thing you ought to do, I would recommend. And I think you need to hold the, you know, you need to let the country see a little bit of the sausage being made. I think it would help the country to see a president competently sitting there saying, hey guys, this is what I'd like to do. Here's where it is. Can we agree at least to have a civil debate? We'll have X amount of time.

Let's see if we can make it happen. So I would first try to say to them, I'm prepared to restore that, you know, the thresholds we had before. I'm prepared to respect the rules that stood this country well for so many years. But first instance, that you're not acting in good faith, I'm prepared to go do what I need to do

to get done what we need for the country. So put it on them. Give them a chance to come to the table and come to the table. And then when they don't, you have a rationale to go out to the country and take no prisoners. Focus on their races. Make sure you've got people. One thing I think didn't happen enough in the last eight years, frankly, was party building, the organizing. Yeah.

You mentioned Senate dysfunction, and the word dysfunction makes me think of my favorite former cabinet secretary, Rex Tillerson. Did you ever talk to Rex, try to say, hey, buddy, maybe leave this. seventh floor, maybe talk to the brilliant people who work for you and stop making them feel terrible about this job? He wasn't allowed to talk to me. That's so silly. Seriously? Literally?

No, I'm serious. He was sequestered in the beginning. We had a date to have dinner before he had his hearing. So I could kind of brief him and give him a sense of where the uses were and our. No. The night before, the day before it, I got a call saying, the secretary can't make it, that that would never an effort to make it up or make it happen. I never got a call from him on one issue that I can recall.

That is so petty and small. No, no wonder he wasn't good at the job. Why call someone who just did your job very well for a couple years? That's a lot of institutional knowledge. Got some really big stuff done. One last nerdy foreign policy question. I promise we'll let you leave. One of the risks you took as Secretary of State was you went to Gaza.

You met with Palestinian people. You expressed empathy for their plight. I see today, like two very disturbing trends in Israel. First is a government that's moving further and further to the right, passing laws like the nation state law that essentially makes the Palestinian second-class citizens. And then you also see Netanyahu hugging the Republican Party, giving speeches, interfering in U.S. politics, and Trump responds in kind by cutting off assistance of the Palestinians and penalizing them.

We just passed the 25th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, and a peace agreement feels further away than ever. I mean, do you think, is it time to admit that the peace process as we know it is no longer alive? Or what's the future of this? Well, there's no, well, there certainly is no peace process, quote, as we know it going on right now. That is for certain. You don't think Jared's handling it? Well, I think, look, I've been a huge supporter of Israel through the years.

I have a lot of friends who are in many different. places on the subject. It's complicated, but here is what is not complicated. The population in Israel between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is no longer majority Jewish. And so Israel has a fundamental confrontation with its own dream, with its own history. And I know where Perez was on that or Ehud Barak or even Sharon or, you know, run the list. And the founders were very clear, Peter Herzl and so forth, Bangorian, in talking about the Israeli vision. There's no way to live that vision if you have second-class citizens. And the dilemma for Israel is, how do you maintain a democracy that fully empowers everybody there and still be a Jewish

state. Now, I'm for it being a Jewish state. In fact, I succeeded for the first time. This has not happened. It hasn't even received enough attention that the Arab world came together around the principles that I articulated in the speech I gave at the end when we left and accepted the principle that it will be a Jewish state. In addition, they retooled the Arab Peace Initiative to embrace not just 1967 lines, but 1967 lines with swaps. The swaps, the swaps. The swaps, Lops meant you would be able to annex settlements into Israel in exchange for giving other land unsettled to the Palestinians. And that would have brought 90% of all the Israelis into Israel itself, rather than living in settlements out in the West Bank. So, you know, there's a way to do it.

It still could be done. But if you are determined there will not be a Palestinian state, then you have this dilemma growing about what kind of rights are the people going to have who do live there. And that is not a recipe for peace. No. So that's what I worry about. And it's a question that people in Israel ask also. The majority of Israelis supported to a state solution. At least they did.

The government that is there now openly has a majority of cabinet members who have said there will never be a Palestinian state. So you articulate correctly that there is a real dilemma here. And all we can do really is, I mean, Israelis have to decide this for themselves, not going to be decided by us, not going to be decided by somebody else. They have to figure out what the real future is. And my hope and prayer is that wiser heads will prevail to understand that if you want to be a Jewish state, you want to be a democracy, you have one available way to create a contiguous, viable Palestinian state that is not a threat. to Israel, and you can work on that. Remember, 1967, Jordan was at war with Israel. Today, it's one of its strongest partners. Egypt, likewise. And Israel's relationship in the whole region has changed because Israel knows how to fight extremists. It knows how to defend itself, and it's lending

some of that expertise to other countries. So the foundation is there to build a piece, but as I tried as hard as I could over the years we were there, if the two leaders, and both of it, by the way, it's not just, it's not Israel. The Palestinians, their own set of problems they bring to the table, which they haven't been willing to solve, whether it's Hamas, or whether it's the willingness of the president of Palestinian Authority, Abbas, to actually take the risk and do things necessary to move. So right now, I think it's pretty much in a very risky stalemate. But I just want to say that so anybody who's scared that this is a Secretary of State's policy tome and it's going to put him to sleep, it's not. This is a story of a journey, my journey, through the great changes in the 1960s and 70s with Richard Nixon, with the war, the civil rights movement, President Kennedy, the assassinations,

the music, the Beatles, I mean, all of this. It's a journey of America in a way. and through the telling of that journey, I think this book shows people how you can make a difference, how you can hold the political system accountable, how you can make things happen. And so far,

if Hugh Hewitt of Fox Radio says it's a must read. Yeah, I saw that. And if, you know, other people have said it's a really good read, I hope people will take time. And every day extra is, you don't have to go to war to feel that, that's the way to live.

If you think every day is extra and you have a life that's purposed on that basis, you're going to be energized and, I think, get things done. It's fun. Well, I will say I always remember you saying Every Day is Extra back in the campaign, and I was always incredibly inspired by the story of your service, both in Vietnam and then when you came back. And it was one of the reasons I wanted to join your campaign.

Well, thank you, John. You did a great job. You did too good a job. You've been gone for too long. So everyone should go read Every Day as Eighty. Extra. Thank you very much. My great pleasure. Great to see you guys. This thing is a, you're doing terrific here. It's a global juggernatzer.

Thank you again to Secretary Kerry for visiting us here in West Hollywood. Sorry about the 11 dogs jumping up at you when you walked in. Check out his book Every Day's Extra. And if you like this episode, please share it with your friends and rate and review us in the iTunes store. It makes a difference. Thanks, guys. See you next week.