to see the full program you can go to booktv.org. i am the dean of the honors college here at miami dade college, and we are so excited to present the final program for the 35th miami and you will book fare. [applause] [cheering] if you think this has been one of the best book fairs ever, please let us know. [applause] i would like to recognize our premier sponsors, the knight foundation, royal caribbean, the bachelor foundation.

also our friends of the book fare coming you've been just extraordinary this week. please raise your hand for the acknowledgment of your work. [applause] at this time if you have not already, please turn off your cell phones also i had the distinct pleasure of welcoming a dynamic duo of lawyers who support the progressive causes. it is a father daughter team. we have eugene and jennifer will introduce the next panelists. [applause] is an honor and privilege to introduce my friend the

ambassador this evening. before politics kurt was a commercial litigator acted in several national organizations dedicated to the justice system and protecting the rights of citizens and consumers. through this work got to know barack obama and early discovered as someone who could and would inspire a nation. in 28 and 2012 lead a tremendous effort in florida and did elect barack obama a democrat, twice. [applause] nominated and confirmed ambassador to singapore one of the most important business hubs and worked with over 4,000 american companies helping them navigate the issues in the areas that were faced.

it was a public policy and business with complex problems with clients in the asia-pacific region. fortunately he still spent some time in miami. [applause] >> thank you, jennifer. is there anyone here who doesn't know who john kerry is? i don't need to tell you about his service to the country and the willingness to accept the sacrifices and the risk leading the troops in the war. coming back from that war and leading the nation in understanding that we were doing the wrong thing in the wrong place to the wrong people keen to serve his state and country for five consecutive terms as a united states senator from the state of massachusetts and

provided a enormous leadership during those terms and then became a secretary of state who led two treaties that only a moron would try to undo. [applause] [cheering] and i must say i do want to welcome senator kerry to miami because it is a place that is and should be an image for everyone in america to see. we opened the doors to refugees from another country that spoke a different language and we gave them a home in our home and created for us a culture in the environment that made us all richer and better. our economy is stronger for it, our people are better for it, my children and grandchildren are fluent in speaking spanish and that's a good thing. my son, the arrogant twit, says

what do you call someone whose monolingual and i said i don't know, what do you call him and he says an american. [laughter] dot, so senator kerry you come here to the community a multilingual community and multicultural community that's figured out how to make it work. we've done the only referendum and defeated them. we've done the referendum and defeated them and we've done what was necessary to show people can live together peacefully, sometimes fractious lee but ultimately leading the way when they show up in november they do the right thing so it's a great honor to welcome senator kerry to one of the greatest cities in the world. [applause]

and following gen jean stearns s never a good idea. anybody that's been in elected life always needs a fault in production. [laughter] anyway, thank you all. i join you in welcoming us to the greatest city in the world miami dade florida. [applause] we've spent a lot of time together over the years that i wanted to get into a little bit of your book. i was telling you before i think this is probably one of the most honest memoirs i've read of anyone in public life and so i think i would like to start off

with what compelled you right now to write the story about your life, your difficulties, your ups and downs. what was it about this moment you want to focus on. >> i want to thank everybody. i'm honored to be here. i used to come here so many times through the years and normally try to find the time just can't do it today. even in the campaign and i want to thank kirk for his service to the country. he served in singapore as the ambassador and did an outstanding job and became equally famous in singapore. a great statement of independence. thank you for your comments

about the book. that in and of itself starts the juxtaposition to what we see in our politics in the world today. what prompted me to write this book is i think the journey that i describe which is uniquely american journey that i'm very proud of began in 1943 in the middle of the war, world war ii when our feelings the greatest generation parents stepped up and undertook to protect the world from fascism. and my first memory as a child literally was being 4-years-old and holding my mother's hand.

my mother or family from massachusetts but her father har had moved abroad for business reasons and his 11 children were all born abroad. born and raised in france and england and when they invaded france she was working as a nurse to help take care of refugees to friend and forged to come to america walking through the rubble of her house but they took over and they learned the family knew churchill and decided to bomb and burn it as they left. as we were walking through the

rubble i remember seeing a staircase going up and a chimney going up to the sky and the glass crunching under our feet and 34-year-old something you remember. i didn't know why, but we visited the beaches of normandy where i remember seeing that remarkable landing at omaha beach that remains one of greatest declarations anybody could make so that prompted me to say. i believe and i trace it and i talk about how the senate changed how ronald reagan, president was mid-1980s was elected just to give you a sense of what was going on.

we would go to dinner and orrin hatch would be there, the senator from maryland, the republican from virginia and other democrats. we would laugh and share our thinking about how to make the country better. when we went to the senate the next day we often took that bipartisanship with us and made things happen. so i read about all of this in the book because the senate has transitioned in the book and it's not that the rules of the senate have changed. the people have changed. it's a type of person who's come there but don't have compromise and scare people in your own caucus with a threat in the

primary and deprive the nation of its democracy. i wrote this book because i think it is a moment we need to get back in touch with who we are to know what to do and for those of us i see a few faces that will share this experience. we almost went to war with the soviet union over cuba. i was a sophomore in college and have been playing and heard a horrifying whisper over the crowd at the president has been shot. i didn't remember until i wrote this book when i did the research if we won that game were finished the game. the article said because they

were 25 minutes into the game when the president was shocked they continued it. so anyway, here's the bottom line. my book and it's not a secretary of state policy told a. it is an american journey described in the context of our times and i believed that writing it is a road map for what we have to do to restore the democracy in our own country. writing it can give people a sense of optimism and hope that if you do what the people did in the last week's we can actually make the issues that matter into the voting issues and we can say no to the wise and the process of assembling you can't be a

democracy if you can't agree on what the facts are. the fact that today there are friends i know appear on the hill, one or another that i served with who talk on a daily basis about everything. they talk on a daily basis about fire theory. and you know the white house is in at-home daycare center. i'm not stepping out of line in

a partisan way to say this but i'iam saying how disappointing t is to me. having members of the institution that was defined by our forefathers to be the institution that pulls us back from those like best pal unacceptable it is that despite what they know to be true are more interested in protecting power, personal and protecting president than they are the institutions of the nation. unacceptable. [applause] the question then becomes how do we get back to where you came from in the 60s. i think a lion in your book that struck the you're talking about

your college friends, the ambassador for an come in talking abou, talking aboutwhety abroad or go to vietnam. the wine you say it is because the children of the greatest generation we share their idealism and servicing duty and country and there's a lot of people in my time into politics where i'vin politicswhere i've t shared that. they are the ones that have thus skewed view if i put a face on but there is some responsibility and the electorate. we are not electing the people that stand up to the ideas we talked up the tail party -- at a cocktail party.

after years of being in this process, i understand that and i share i'm sure nine tenths of you here or maybe all of you here share an anger at the dysfunctionality of washington today. republican democrat, right, left. they are not getting it done. what i thought happened was you had to resolution that promised a contract that saithe contractr government, less regulation. we are going to cut your taxes and do away with roe v. wade. guess what happened, nothing so you get the tea party going to get rid of these guys and make washington work. they didn't do any of the agendas and you wind up with a freedom caucus and they didn't get it on and then you wind up with a hostile takeover of the republican party by donald trump. that's where we are.

and on the other side of the fence people are equally there is no sense of the agenda or the production are so forth. i think americans, the vast majority want adults to run the show and get the job done. it's pretty straightforward. it's the never-ending perpetual campaign. we have to end of the ability to actually have a fully democratic election in the general election in america number one because of the gerrymandering which deprives people of legitimate opportunities and secondly, we've got to get this enormous gargantuan amount of special interest money out of american

politics. [applause] there's no other honest way to talk about it. you're not going to get any money from us. when i ran for president in 2004 w2004we bring the campaign-finae restrictions it didn't have the ability to run they said you cannot run a 50 state campaign for the presidency in the united states without being outside of the limited money and campaign system that has done purposely so we have to rescue the democracy and i have to tell you in thinking about that to

measure this and i write about this in the book, when we were in the formative age of politics was far from perfect. we all know that. there were excesses in the 1960s and 1970s but i was driven by this moral sense of rectitude that we were motivated by the best intentions and coming out of that your code of time i mentioned the assassination of kennedy. the next year you have the civil rights movement and we broke the back of jim crow in america and got the civil rights past in

1965. 1966 lyndon johnson 7,500,000 troops to go over there and that was 65. i was not opposed. i have questions about it i also had a great sense of to whom much is given much is expected in view of something to your country. then later we learned that the degree to which -- i didn't think i was talking to loud. [laughter] we had the ability to change things and it wasn't until 1967 the first march on the pentagone pentagon and then later and 68.

i came back and heard the first coming back from the ambassador hotel and i write about it in the book when robert kennedy was killed, is fascinated. some editosenator evers was ass, martin luther king assassinated, robert kennedy assassinated. the tumultuous convention in chicago. riots from then through the 70s, the early 70s in the streets of the country, houses burning, detroit, los angeles. people with machine guns declaring their extremism, radicalism. i think there was something like a thousand different bombings in the period of time with the burnings in this extremism. it was scary. and we had vietnam, the tet

offensive, things getting worse and so forth. our nation was in the dark place. i say all this to you because in this book, i write about how we got through it. i'm telling you it was worse than where we are today not in terms of the presidency, but in terms of reports o to the nation what was happening. we were polarized and have a president who declared he was not a crook and then proved he was. that president left office in ad the scandal of watergate. so think of all of that and the caskets coming home from vietnam and the tearing apart of families, brothers against brothers, fathers against fathers and i'm going to lead the nation and go to jail. that's the bottom line of my message.

i first demonstrated against the war in vietnam, the figures demonstrated for the environme environment, 1971 did we do, you should apply for this and for yourselves, we've got 20 million americans out of their homes to say i don't want to, we don't want to, my family doesn't want to live next to a toxic waste site that gives us cancer. we lived next to the dump in massachusetts and we don't want to drink water that makes us sick or have air quality that ts particular to send our kids to the hospital. we didn't stop with a demonstration. we targeted the 12 worst folks in the united states congress and we pulled them the dirty dozen. went after them in a very concerted targeted way into several of the 12 loss to the.

we passed the clean air act, the safe drinking water act. marine mammal protection act, coastal zone management act richard nixon signed the epa into existence. we didn't even have an environmental protection agency in america until citizens said we are making this a voting issue and i will tell you what happens to the survivors and congress by seeing their colleagues lose you stiffen the spines unlike any other message you could send. and they vote on things. that is where i am encouraged. in this last election, we have elected across america the largest class of new members of congress since the watergate class of 1974. it's amazing. [applause]

from kansas and wisconsin we saw six legislators go from republican to democrat and we defeated even if we lost a couple of seats in the place ann the senate, we went in to nevada and arizona and john tessler was elected in montana so i am hopeful about the future. i believe, and here's the other thing that ought to motivate y you. more are voting in the midterm then ever before. 49%. please, america, what are we

doing when barack obama was elected president in that historic moment, the turnout was 62.3%. when he was reelected with 58.9 but the point i'm making guess what it was when donald trump was elected, 54.6, 54.2. and the last time it was 54.2 was al gore in 2000. get the message? people have to come out and vote in our country. people have to exercise the greatest single privilege or is in the world for democracy jews citizenship. be a citizenshi be a citizen an. [applause] >> young people voted higher than ever before.

everyone of you that as a parent or grandparent if you have a kid in college today, don't give thanksgiving turkey unless they pledge that they are going to vote. get tough. we've got to make this better. i have the privilege and a number of countries both as a senator and in x. secretary. i've seen people wait in the hot sun with tanks and guns around to get a thumb print with purple ink showing they voted 80%, 85%, 90%. it's hard for a secretary of state to run around the world saying you've got to live like us. we don't have a lot of time until we open it up for questions, i know you will want to talk policy. but i think the undercurrent of the book is we've been in dark

times and we've gotten out of it. the moment i saw your character that is a model for how i say nothing is going to get me down i remember we were in iowa together and in october of 2003, i just got off the phone with a major supporter. i asked him to support you and he said john kerry is bruce willis in the sixth and he's the only one that knows it. running behind outsourcing you went down there every single day in iowa and we not only won iowa but he won by i think 11 points. what is it about those that allow you to get out there right now that you can still be relaxing and fighting for this? >> it is really not complicated. every day is extra. you don't have to go to war to learn it.

when i came back i felt privileged to be alive. it was complicated. it is difficult for anybody there. if you come home from that, and a lot of other people don't, you feel a sense of responsibility to live up to the gift of life that is every day after that. and my crew and i share that expression. you can survive cancer and have a friend in your life or family that had a brush with death or a car accident. in many ways to be reminded of this nobody should have to be that there are many ways to be reminded that i just decided you bear down. you know the old saying when the

going gets tough, the tough get going. i knew what they were. i understood. i felt if i just hammered away and people got to know me i thought i was going to win and that is what we did household for household, that built an organization. a lot of people among them and we managed to make it happen. what upsets me today, ladies and gentlemen, is a good dysfunctionality of washington and the extremist point of view being promulgated in a very demagogic fashion and in a very dangerous way stealing our future from us. it really upsets me. i will acknowledge it. there is a sense of frustration.

i have the privilege of negotiating for the united states in paris and negotiating the climate change agreement. against the united states and the climate agreement we failed in copenhagen for years earlier. now as the secretary i said what a privilege it is that i had this opportunity, so i went to china, negotiated and we agreed to create a group in us and one year later i'm a president obama stood up and announced a joint intended - admission reduction r both of the countries.

we managed to get an agreement with 196 nations agreeing we are all going to be choosing to do something to meet the challenge of climate change. at the plenary session afterwards when we passed it, don't anybody believe that we are leaving here having guaranteed the planet that we are going to hold the temperature rise to 2 degrees which is what the scientists are telling us is what we need to do. that is not what we have achieved in paris. what we are achieving is the bringing together of 196 nations which were simultaneously going to commit to move in the same direction to deal with energy. the solution to climate change its energy policy. and today, solar is cheaper than coal. there is no reason, but guess

what. china's tallest hundred 50 megawatts of coal supposedly going to come online to produce power. i-india, likewise. so, right now it is not an exaggeration. we are owned by a mission and unwillingness to do what we have to do. we are living out a mutual suicide pact planet either. and people need to understand this. the fires in california are not because of, maybe a few were not damaged but they are there because there's more moisture in the water, in the oceans coming up in two rain because of the warming of the ocean and the intensity of the wind and the intensity of the weather has changed and the increased amount of flooding that comes with it

creates a greater faster brush growing and then you have a drought that dries out the brush and you have more fuel than has been added to the capacity for fire and it rages through as a result. so, it is also climate related. we had three storms last year. they cost you, the american taxpayer $265 billion. it dropped, one of the three storms dropped more in five days in houston and once in 50,000 year storm that dropped more water that goes out of the niagara falls in an entire year year. you had the first recorded hurricane with sustained wind of 24 hours over 185 miles an hour and we all know maria decimated

porter rico so we have 26 different ones in 500 year thanr storms in the last ten years so if you don't begin to get a message from what is happening on planet earth, god knows what your capacity for spying in is that the capacity for science is inadequate.

people in the room tha that her hearing processes and the first time that we've heard this. i had the privilege of being the secretary of state of the 1970s by point. the president is getting rid of the paris that he is undoing the agreement and so forth. and i say to people first of all it is not personal. i worry about it lost on a personal level but in terms of what it means in the macro policy, strategic policy it is a security issue.

we are going to have massive numbers of refugees in various parts of the world and places where food production is reduction because of the lack of water and the changing of naturf nature flows of certain rivers because we are losing the ice that melts and the amount that pours into those rivers and we are going to have an open arct arctic. without the rules of the road you cannot govern what is going to happen on the planet in terms of cyber, disease, trade, none of it can be properly managed on a unilateral basis for saying my country first is a public events. you've got to be able to talk about how every president puts his or her country first there is no question about that but

when you put in people's space the way you do, you drive people away and begin to lose the opportunity which is to engage the world. example, when we were told a million people are going to die in four months, president obama had the courage to send 4,000 troops over east and west africa. we worked with the british, french and all of us together drawing on the japanese, the chinese, many other nations we stopped it in its tracks and west africa. [applause] aids in africa today we are on the cusp of the first generation of children being born aids free in africa. that is because of what we have been able to do. [applause] when it comes to the great challenges of the planets that are important to make us in america safer, you've got to be

engaged with others. a classic example if you heard abouof you heardabout the caravt week or two, what an example of disgrace that we have this thrown at american stay after day and the day after the election that must be about 800 miles away, we don't need to worry about that. it's incredible, folks. the point i make again, when i was in the senate we put together a thing called plan colombia. a billion dollars when columbia was merely a failed state and today it is implementing a peace agreement with the longest running civil war on the planet and they are trying to implement back and set an example for the rest of latin america.

we need to get back to exactly that. [applause] there are so many things that we want to talk about but i would love to. it is moving in lightning. if either of your daughters

callecalled uganda showed a lite bit of that site a few. in the little bit of time we have left, i think that your unique knowledge on the deal where we are. when you were the committee chaiare the committee chairand f state, that is where we are right now is not a good place honored to work i would like to hear your thoughts on that. >> may i ask your permission you mentioned john mccain and that is an important chapter of my life and an important chapter in his life, and i think it is kind of what we need to think about in our country today.

he was shot down in 1967. it was the war over vietnam and mine was over the delta in the south of the vietnam and 1968 he was shot down in 67 and then he spent five and a half years in prison camp so when he came back and i came back we came back from different places and thinking of where we were and john came from a different place politically. so long story short we didn't know each other when we came to the senate for a number of years and then we were thrown together on a flight to kuwait by seniority we were seated opposite each other. and we -- everybody else had fallen asleep and we were still awake late into the night lighting after desert storm. and so i started asking questions. i asked about his father and annapolis and his grandfather.

we need to help end the war about the war and we decided we would collaborate and do that. for ten years, john mccain and i have hearings. john was viciously attacked during these hearings labeled the manchurian candidate. by after all that he'd been through through some of these right-wing unbelievably inappropriate individuals who were exploiting this process. so we worked with general brent

scowcroft all the way through this period until they ultimately normalize relations with vietnam and began to think about vietnam as a country, not just a war. before john mccain passed away in arizona, he was on his hospital bed looking out at this beautiful valley in sonoma and i talked to him about it. he smiled and we talked about what we have been able to accomplish and i want to share it with you. no country in history and all of the warfare has ever done as much to implement an exhaustive accounting of all of the missing and captured. the american people can be proud

of what they've accomplished and continue to accomplish at this endeavor. most are unaware that even today we have american military personnel that continue the search in vietnam. we still dig up the c-130 and we still climbed to the remote mountain tops and excavate the earth in a rice paddy or village. i was taken out to a lush green field near the farm and a complex scaffold of what had been billed into the excavated area of a downed c-130 that had crashed and had never been recovering. i walked into the area and had an eerie feeling that i was literally walking into the crew's resting place. they were killed before impact or whether there was time for terror or panic as they

plummeted to earth. the plane hit with such an impact it drove itself 20 feet below the surface we were walking on. in spite of the excavation the troops worked painstakingly to scrape away time explaining to me how they managed their own emotions and performed the difficult task of the fragments of what was once determined team of young americans at war. i was amazed by the meticulous archaeological methodology of finding scraps of clothing, a fragment of the bone and then undertaking the extraordinary forensic investigations. the service members brought home to the mourning families who all

deserve answers. in our new friendship and the work that we did, we pretending the war about the war. if a protester and a prisoner of war could find common ground on the most divisive issues, finding common ground almost anything else didn't seem so hard after all. that's what we have to restore to the american politics, folks. [applause] i think that bringing up vietnam we were lucky to be in vietnam when we celebrated 20 years of opening the embassy and you had

left for singapore to go there but a celebration of that. the year before i left, ed 8% of the vietnamese people say their best friend is the united states of america. it's an incredible achievement with you and senator mccain and others have achieved. these are the kind of things that make a difference whether it be the paris accord, the efforts in the middle east moving the ball and now getting to iran to work that you did over a seven-year period it doesn't go away just the go away from the process. >> if i can say to you because i took the liberty of diverting from the question you asked about iran, so let me bring them together because as i said i don't take it personally. here's why i'm encouraged.

here's why i feel good about myself, the obama administration and what we did because 38 state38thstate in the united stf america passed renewable portfolio balls moving to the sustainable renewable energy. more than a thousand mayors in the country every major city has committed to be part of this effort and keep moving towards what the paris agreement required. so we are moving into the reason i feel -- i don't feel sorry about it because we are losing momentum, we are not operating the leadership, we are not leadinleaving the world to the w energy arc of place which is the biggest markets the world has ever seen with four to 5 million users today coming u going up to 9 billion in the century in the next 30 years.

think about that, the biggest market after. we are still moving their. what's interesting to me is 196 countries have now become 195 countries they are all still moving and so donald trump may have pulled out of the paris agreement, but the american people are still wanting to move in it. so i feel good about that. i feel actually he hasn't been able to raise one legitimate reason for getting out so i feel completely vindicated and encouraged because guess what, you can't get out of the paris agreement until the day after the 2020 election. [applause]

and on the iran deal a few weeks ago in new york during the un general assembly, the chinese, russians, the german, french, british, foreign ministers all this with the foreign minister of iran and they all talked about how to keep the deal going and guess what even though the president put the sanctions in place which is a regime strategy so everybody gets it straight if you know of a jeffersonian democrat waiting in iran in the background to take over, let me know. but most peoplmost people tell s means is they are going to be empowered more than they were before. i don't think it works but what we sethatwould be see if it wor. bottom line they want to keep the deal alive and gues guess w, our own secretary defends and around prior secretary of state both argued the cause to keep wp

video and interestingly enough, israel believed we should keep the deal it is safer with the deal rather than without it. i'm sorry that you made the decision he made becaus that hee i think it takes us backwards. if you are the world's greatest negotiator, don't you think the smart thing would have been to say i don't like this deal, but i'm not going to pull out of the deal for years because i'm going to give you the chance to do the deal we need to do to fix things you are doing and pathway you get to the french, german, british, chinese and russians supporting the negotiation and you've lost nothing, not one iota but that is not their strategy.

so, we've got to make our democracy work. [applause] thank you for coming to miami and speaking with us. i saw you on a program recently. [applause] two prompts this question for you why is it so difficult to impeach this president?

thank you for your service. speak into the microphone please. >> through the protesting and my question is i understand we are making progress and albeit on the climate change front. but what you see as the most important ways for the state level to encourage people to win the factor in front of us to embrace them.

after all the work that is done is the secretary of state and the war against isis. can you describe the situation is in the state of iraq? >> [inaudible] [applause]

on the impeachment, i don't think -- will, some of you won't like this and that's okay we shouldn't be talking about impeachment. it is a high crime and misdemeanor and what we need to do is not politicize it. it would be a huge mistake. it happened with bill clinton and if people perceive that that is our global and that is what we are going to do right now, we really will come out on the short end i think in the end. that's not to say that it may not have been if robert mueller comes back with major indicators of criminal activity or a breach of law or whatever, then it may rise to the high level of crimes

of misdemeanors that we should be looking for it right now. we should be looking for how to get the country's business done at this moment. [applause] we've got to start talking to each other with respect. and here's respect of facts to begin to open pup a dialogue that can change minds. if -- and one of the difficulties ask today, we have so many platforms of information delivery that getting your information becomes self-selective. people want to go to fox go

to msnbc and use facebook get your news, which is the way huge numbers of people are get their news today you wind up not sharing in a broad dialogue that really teaches you and gives you the kind of background that you need to get. so i think it is important to engage in a local level many politics and in communicating and have teach-in pane college and universities begin to invite the community in. have a conversation about it. in a nonpolitical way begin so show people what science it get scientists in, have an evening with them bring you know into the dialogue third question was about iraq a longer answer except they put in a new government in iraq. iran has certain tentacles into iraq but iran helped in some ways to get the resolution of the government issue that we needed to get. iraq needs reform. it needs to do its business of

being genuinely diverse. and available to everybody and if they divide everything into shia sunni it is going to be extremely difficult to have the stability we want in iraq. but i hope this government is, in fact, going to do that. one of the things i would like to see is larger regional communication of the countries in the middle east to talk about a new security arrangement for entire middle east and i believe that -- the leaders i was talking about with the kings and crown prince and other who are run those countries were prepared to engage in that kind of dialogue. i think it would have been the next step of a new administration. that we not wound up with a administration that is picking individual players and trying to work a larger -- strategy that i think is -- is troubled in terms of where it is going and final question -- most important question of all is advice for a teenager who want the to go into politics

thank you for first of all wanting to go into politics. [applause] single most important thing you can do right now is do everything to get the best information possible. go finish your studies. go to college. decide whether you need a graduate degree or not after that. but important thing is, to lead the the kind of life where you come to the political table with credibility. where people will feel you have earned and know what you're talking about. that you have a good agenda and a good ability to be able to move it forward, now, do you have to therefore look at you know we just elected young woman who doesn't doing anything in politics but ran out of her own frustration. i think it is a little better to get a little bit of experience, get something under your table. but it's not essential. it doesn't make the difference

exclusively and sometimes that person come to the table who doesn't have it there's going to bring a stronger fresher more important voice in some way. but you have to pick your moment. but the most important thing you can do is be respectful of people, want of it a dialogue engage in an important way that tries to bring people together. not divide them. know your history, know your psychology. and -- when yeah geography, geology -- [laughter] and by the way, nowadays it wouldn't hurt to have a good understanding of comparative religion and particularly wouldn't hurt at all to be maybe very steep in psychology. [laughter] miami -- help me say thank you to the secretary of state, my friend john kerry.

[applause]