President Kiss: I'm the President of Webb Institute and I'm delighted to have you with us. I'd like to begin the evening with the Pledge of Allegiance and then the singing of the national anthem, led by our Dean, Roger Compton and the Webb Family Singers. So please stand and join me in the pledge.

There are some special guests with us tonight that I'd like to introduce. First I'd like to introduce Mr. Charles Visconti and his wife, Roberta. Charlie is the Chairman of our Board of Trustees. I also have the pleasure of introducing Professor José Femenia, Head of the Department of Engineering at Kings Point. And finally, I'm pleased to introduce my predecessor as President of Webb, Dr. Jim Conti and his wife, Connie. Welcome.

Jim had the honor of presenting an honorary doctorate to the namesake of tonight's lecture, Alfred Zeien, and before I introduce our speaker tonight - I want to say a few words about Al. He was a 1952 graduate of Webb Institute. And he's probably among our most successful alumni. Rather than tell his story I'd like to read you part of the story that comes from a book by Gordon McKinney called The Cutting Edge. It's a book about the Gillette Company, and there's a chapter in it called "Al Zeien takes charge." And I'm going to read a page or so.

Al eventually became Chairman of the Board of Gillette, and made a most generous donation to Webb several years ago asking that we establish a lecture series to address important topics, not necessarily related to the marine industry.

Tonight we are proud to have the third Zeien lecture presented by Mr. John Douglass, President of the Aerospace Industries Association. It's a special honor for me tonight to introduce him as our guest because I had the pleasure of working for him briefly and saw his leadership abilities up close and personal. Mr. Douglass became the seventh full time Chief Executive of the Association in September 1998 and before that served three years as Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition of Defense Systems with the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps where I was one of his deputies.

A nationally recognized expert in systems acquisition, Mr. Douglass has extensive experience in Congress, the Department of Defense and the Executive Branch as a policy authority, contracting officer, engineering officer, test and evaluation officer, program control officer and research director. Before being named Civilian Navy Executive, Mr. Douglass was with the Senate Armed Services Committee where he was foreign policy and science and technology advisor to Senator Sam Nunn. He served as a lead minority staff member for defense conversion and technology reinvestment programs. Earlier, Mr. Douglass completed a twenty-eight year service with the U.S. Air Force where he retired as Brigadier General in 1992. His numerous Air Force assignments included service as the Deputy U.S. Military Representative to NATO, as well as Director of Plans and Policies and Director of Science and Technology for the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force. He also served as Special Assistant to the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisitions.

Within the Executive Branch, Mr. Douglass was Director of National Security Programs for the White House, responsible for formulation of policy on a broad range of national security issues. He served as President Reagan's personal representative to the Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management chaired by David Packard. He's a native of Miami, Florida, earned a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial engineering from the University of Florida, a Master of Science degree in industrial engineering from Texas Tech, a Master of Science degree in management science from Fairleigh Dickinson, and he's done post-graduate work at Cornell University Center for International Studies where he was an Air Force research fellow in the Peace Studies Program. He's a member of the Board of Governors of the Aerospace Industries Association and Chairman of the Aerospace Technology Policy Forum. In addition, he's Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Center for Advanced Technologies.

I've mentioned all of these background accomplishments of Mr. Douglass in order to set the stage for possible questions later on. I think its good to know all the places that he's been. Having said all that, I probably embarrassed him by giving a eulogy. His topic tonight is "Leadership Lessons I've Learned In Government and Industry" and I'm pleased to present Mr. John Douglass.

Mr. Douglass: Well good evening everybody. It's a pleasure to be here and listening to that wonderful introduction about Alfred Zeien I am humbled by the fact that I was selected to be the number three lecturer here. My accomplishments, although somewhat varied, certainly don't rise to the same level as those of Mr. Zeien. I was listening carefully to his career accomplishments and the only parallel - the part that I could detect was that we both worked for Admiral Rickover at one point in time. I'm sure that shaped both of our lives quite a bit. I want to also thank Ron for the invitation and for the lovely dinner this evening and the chance to meet some of the leaders in the class. It's always invigorating to me to have an opportunity to come into the college environment to talk. And I do this periodically because of the academic rigor and the sort of freedom of expression and the rethinking of one's values. It sort of brought to mind something that President Truman once said - he used to also lecture a lot and he once said when you go to colleges, always try to find out what the students, want and tell them that when you get there. And I'm not really going to do that tonight. I'm just going to give you my personal experiences with leadership but I'm going to weave in leadership examples because my own personal accomplishments are very modest compared to the overall tapestry of leadership, especially leadership associated with our country here, the United States.

But before I do I have to tell you an interesting story about wonderful introductions like the one you gave me tonight. About a hundred years ago around the turn of the century we were approaching elections just like we are here on November the 5th. There was a big election here in New York, and at that time a future president of the United States, President Taft, was running for the presidency and in those days you have to recall there was no television, no radio, so if you wanted to see a candidate up close or find out what a candidate was really like you had to go to a political rally. And so there was one of these political rallies here in the State of New York, and President Taft was due to be introduced by the other senator from New York which was a New York businessman by the name of Chauncy DePew and he was famous for very long introductions. On this particular evening he went on and on and on about what a great person Senator Taft was, and at one point in the introduction he said Senator Taft is literally "pregnant" with courage and so Taft was taken aback a little bit by that because he'd never been referred to as being "pregnant" before. Then Chauncy DePew went on and on, and a little bit later he used the phrase again. He said Senator Taft is also "pregnant" with modesty. So when Taft finally rose to take the podium himself, he was a huge man, weighed over three hundred pounds, he put his arms around his great girth and he said "Well, Senator DePew has twice this evening referred to me as being 'pregnant.' If it's a boy I guess I'll call it Courage, and if it's a girl we'll call it Modesty. But if, as I suspect, it's only gas, we'll call it Chauncy DePew." I'm going to try to stay away from the gas this evening.

When you talk about leadership, probably the place to begin is what is it. And when you think about it and you go to find out and read about it, you find that there are a lot of varied opinions about what it is. The closest that I can come to describing it is like that old saying its "in the eye of the beholder." There are some interesting schools of thought about leadership, though. I want to talk to you about it a little bit before we get into some of the aspects of what leadership is and why the theory that leadership is genetically based. Now if you were to go back in history to medieval times and before that, you looked and you saw how leadership took place around the world. It was generally handed down through dynasties. There was this idea of the divine mandate and that was that if God wanted you to be a leader he would have you born into one of these families and that was the concept, especially within western Judo-Christian society that allowed monarchs to transfer power down through the ages. And if God wanted you to be a follower then you were born a peasant. And that was generally accepted in those days.

And yet the idea of genetically based leadership is still true today because leadership has such a universal quality. Some people for example believe that in athletics it has a lot to do with your reactions, your size and so on and maybe in a certain period of time that was more true than it is today. Some people believe politically today you have to be good looking to be a leader. We had some examples - I served in the White House under Ronald Reagan and there's a former movie star who knew how to project himself in modern media and that kind of leadership comes to mind. Then there are qualities like aggression. Some people think that some leaders, Adolf Hitler for example or Saddam Hussein, are extremely aggressive people. Some believe that this quality of leadership comes naturally in some genetic way rather than being learned. Who among us know of a school to be a dictator or where do we teach people institutionally even in the most backward countries? We very seldom teach people to be cruel and do some of the kinds of aggressive things that we see leaders do today.

Some people think it's intelligence that makes a leader. And yet we've seen some cases in recent history - some of our most intelligent presidents - Jimmy Carter comes to mind, weren't as successful as others who were not quite as intelligent. So maybe that's a quality. Maybe it's not. And it used to be for the women in the audience, gender related - depending on where you are, in what part of society, there was almost no role for women to play in leadership unless you happened to be in that elite little group of royalty. And we all know that in modern times this idea that leadership is uniquely connected to being male is totally false. But in the past we have seem exceptions like some of the great queens, like Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth in England. In more modern times that myth has been dispelled by excellent leaders like Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi in India. So that's the genetic view. I think there are some aspects of leadership that are probably connected to genetics.

The military, on the other hand, especially in democratic societies like ours, can't choose its leaders based on genetics and so the military takes a different view as does most institutions in our society believe that leadership is a trait that can be learned or at least a skill that can be developed. And so you have in the military programs like reserve officers training corps and so on. Officers' training schools. The Marine Corps has their training school down at Quantico, Virginia. I know one of the professors here is from the Naval Academy. The whole idea behind these academies is leadership can be trained. The whole idea of studying history is based on the concept that you can look at history and draw lessons from it, so you can derive some notion of how to lead, based on examples from the past. My own experience in the Air Force touches on this. Those of you that are familiar with the history of World War II will know the Air Force didn't exist until after World War II. Prior to World War II the Air Force in the United States was part of the Army. It was called the Army Air Force, and it had a reputation for being the most undisciplined part of the military. And indeed fighter pilots were notorious for being undisciplined in the military. Bomber pilots were a little more disciplined. But after World War II, what happened in the military? The great sort of divide in history that happened right at the end of World War II was the intention of nuclear weapons. And it just turned out that the service that could most effectively deal with nuclear weapons was the United States Air Force. And so we had an interesting problem in society. We had these terribly destructive weapons and people - politicians- were saying, "wait a minute now. We're going to turn these nuclear weapons over to these crazy fighter pilots who you know are out buzzing our farms and they won't wear the uniforms right. They won't follow orders and so on." And there was a period of time after World War II where the Air Force had to completely change its leadership style. I came in a few years after this happened but clearly saw it in the early days of my career.

And so in the late 1950's the Strategic Air Command was born and it was born based on an Air Force General's role model of Curtis Lamay. They developed a theory of management, which meant discipline above all because we couldn't afford to have people that were undisciplined and didn't follow the rules in control of nuclear weapons, and so the Air Force became bifurcated. You had the fighter pilots who were pretty undisciplined and you had the Strategic Air Command people who were very, very tightly disciplined. And two theories of leadership grew up in the Air Force. The ones that were very tightly disciplined developed a style which became known as Theory X, and this was based on the principle that basically people are no damn good and if you give them a chance they're going to do the wrong thing, not the right thing, so everything had to be done by the checklist. And if you violated that checklist you were out. And there were movies made about this. Some of you may recall the famous Jimmy Stewart movie, "Strategic Air Command," which came out in the late 1950's. Another one was "Gathering of Eagles." There was a movie with Gregory Peck called "Twelve O'clock High" about the discipline that bomber pilots have to have. The other part of the Air Force was following what was called Theory Y management or Theory Y leadership. This was based on the principle that people are basically good and the way that you motivate them is through incentives. And in the early part of my career, young officers were constantly tugged back and forth between examples of Theory X and Theory Y leadership.

The reason why I go through this and give you my own experience of it is that, in the end, the truth is that people really don't know what the best leadership style is for any given period of time, and often leadership styles that lead you to success in life are very much dependent upon the times in which you live and the group of people that you're associated with. So to use my example a little further, if you happen to be a person who was a very Theory Y person, sort of a free thinker, do things your own way, don't like to follow the discipline, you would have never succeeded in the Strategic Air Command of the Air Force. The other example would be true as well. If you were a Theory X leader you didn't do very well as a fighter pilot.

So you might ask, why talk about leadership at all? If it's such a vague thing and it depends so much on the circumstance, why talk about it all. And, of course, the answer to that is that it plays a huge, huge role in our lives. As we speak, all of us fit into the role of both leader and follower. Tonight I'm sort of the leader here and you're the followers. Tomorrow your professors will be the leaders; the students will be the followers. If you get on an airplane and go somewhere, like I've got to fly back to Washington, I'm clearly going to be a follower in the back. The pilot up there is the leader. And so it goes through our lives right on up to life and death decisions about what happens to our country. Like are we going to go to war with Iraq? You think anybody in this room is going to make that decision? Where will that decision be made? We are all followers when it comes to some of these life and death decisions that will be made maybe by our President, maybe by our President in consultation with Congress. What is going to happen to our economy? Each of us can contribute in certain ways to that. We can all try to save our money or we could try to invest wisely or so on, but none of us has the power to affect the national economy. When it comes to decisions like that we're talking about leadership in the Congress, the House or the Senate -- Leadership within the bureaucracy of our government. And it does make a huge difference on our lives. Whether our lives are prosperous, whether we go to war. Some of the young people in this room, if we were to have a war, might find themselves in military service. They might put their lives at stake. So leadership does count.

Now I want to talk a little bit about some of these - all of these - I talked a little bit about genetic qualities. I've talked a little bit about qualities that can be learned. And there are some qualities in between. Like where does courage come from? Is courage a genetic thing? Are people born brave? When did they learn to be brave? Where does integrity come from? Are some people just born honest? Or is that a learned trait? Is the kind of goodness that one would see in a person of high integrity - is that naturally there? How about hard work, the work ethic? Why do some people end up basically being lazy and other people have a high work ethic? Psychologists and sociologists would debate this issue about what the role of genetics is in these things. What is the role of our environment and learning?

Let's go back and look at history. A couple of examples that I thought were really interesting. In the beginning of our country, did you ever stop to think about the men who signed the Declaration of Independence? Imagine yourself in Philadelphia in those days and it gets down to the point where we say okay we're going to break with the British. And here's a document to sign and if you sign this document you are committing treason against the crown for which you can be hanged and probably will be hanged if you're caught. If the war that we all know is going to follow doesn't go well in your area, you own a big plantation in New York or South Carolina or Virginia, and the British get a hold of that area, what do you think is going to happen to your property? Gone. You're a pauper. So it takes - it took a lot of courage for those men to take those quills out and put their John Hancock, as we say, because of his beautiful big signature on that document. It took courage for this country to begin.

One of the most interesting applications of integrity came a few years later in 1803 when President Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase. A lot of people don't realize that when he signed the Louisiana Purchase land values in Virginia and in the coastal colonies were very, very high because west of the Allegheny Mountains was French and Indian territory. It was very unsafe there for colonists from the east, and so after the Revolution land there had been divided up into fairly big land holdings, and there was a huge demand for sharecroppers to find other places to make their farms. So all of the timber in Northern Virginia was cut down in those years before the Revolution so that little farms could be way up on the side of the mountains and so on. And when Jefferson signed that Louisiana Purchase, the land values in the eastern colonies went from very, very high values to practically nothing. So here was an example of a President of the United States signing a document that insured his own immediate bankruptcy. How many of us believe we would see something like that happen today? That's a rare application of integrity that we can all aspire to.

A couple of interesting examples that I think are important that talk about the situational application of leadership can be found in the American Civil War and for those of you - I know Ron knows, but the rest of you I don't think would have any way of knowing this, but my hobby is Civil War reenacting and I am a battery commander. I have a Civil War cannon, and my unit is an artillery unit in Alexander's Battalion, Longstreet's Corps, Army of Northern Virginia. So we primarily do confederate. But we also do Federal. And when we do Federal we're First Connecticut Heavy Artillery. Why do I do this? Because I'm fascinated with the leadership issues and the experiences that young men - and a few young women, for those women who are here this evening, there were women in the ranks in those days disguised as men. Most people don't know that. But this was the great wrenching experience that created modern America. Who could imagine America today with the institution of slavery? Who could imagine the country like that? And it took that great Civil War in which more Americans were killed than any other war we've ever fought to bring us to the kind of America that we know today. And when you think about some of the leaders there they bring out a very interesting principle, and that is sometimes when you're in one situation you're a total failure. And you turn to another situation where your leadership style may fit more aptly and you're a fantastic success. The famous Confederate infantry General Stonewall Jackson was a good example of that. I picked him out because he was a college professor before the war. I thought that might be an apropos example here. And his nickname at the Virginia Military Institute was Old Fool Tom. His students openly ridiculed him. His lectures were terrible and he was generally conceded by everybody that knew him to be one of the worst teachers that anybody had every come across. His career was clearly going to go nowhere. Along came the Civil War. He became a Brigadier General in the Confederate Army and immediately rose to stardom because this guy knew how to fight. They used to call him when he was in the Confederate Army "Old Blue Light" because when the battle would get going he would get caught up in it, and they say that his eyes would shine with this strange blue light. And in those days winning was everything. If you were a part of either the Confederate or the Federal Army and your line began to collapse, that's when you got killed.

A few minutes ago we were standing pledging the flag. It reminded me of one of my first examples in Civil War reenacting which had to do with the Battle of Cedar Creek. I was just a private in a Confederate infantry unit, and we were portraying a battle in which the Confederates had overrun a Federal camp and pushed a big large force of Federal soldiers out of their camp. But they regrouped and they came back and won the battle. I remember being in that long gray line, and they got us all lined up and we were down at the bottom of the hill because we had pushed the Yankees down into this valley and they had gone back up over. We couldn't see them because they were over the side of the hill. And all of a sudden we heard these drums and we heard voices and commands and so on, and the thing that I remember seeing coming up over the top of that hill were the tops of American flags, regiment after regiment after regiment down the line as far as you could see, and then those blue hats came out. And then at the top of the hill came all of these Federal soldiers in their beautiful blue uniforms with the bayonets glistening in the sun and you could hear their officers giving the command, "ready, aim," down came thousands of rifles. It seemed like every one was pointed at me. You knew this is not a good place to be. Yet that is the kind of leadership that young men had to deal with during that period of time. Extremely brutal war where people stood a hundred yards, fifty yards apart and blasted at themselves with very, very lethal weapons.

So we had people who were total failures before the war rise to real leadership positions. Two others on the Federal side we all ought to remember. One was Ulysses Grant who went on to become President of the United States after the war, but he was the greatest Union commander during the war. He, before the war, was a total failure, he did have some moderate success in the Mexican War. Then he got out and every single thing he ever did in business was a failure. He took to drinking and became an alcoholic. Just prior to the break up of the Civil War he was actually selling fireworks door to door in his home state. Later, he came into the Union Army, became the Union's best general, and after the war was elected President of the United States. One of his classmates was General Sherman. He had a nervous breakdown early in the war. He also had been a complete failure before the war as a civilian -- heavy drinker as well….but became one of the great Union commanders. So leadership, especially in the American sense, is one that depends a lot on the time and the situation at hand.

Some other interesting aspects about American leadership are that some people turn out to be able leaders no matter where they go. George Washington, our first President, is a great example. He was not only a leader as a general in the revolution military and a political leader of great spirit. General Eisenhower, another good example. Great solider. Some would argue not as successful during peacetime as during war. He was a Lieutenant Colonel when World War II began and became the supreme Allied commander in Europe during the war. MacArthur, who was another great American General, was kind of a rival of Eisenhower's. MacArthur wanted to be President of the United States and was never given that opportunity. As a matter of fact, he got into real trouble when he was a commander in Korea because of his political aspirations, and Harry Truman fired him and removed him from command. But he was asked one time what he thought of Eisenhower. And he made the comment that Ike was the best clerk that ever worked for him. Well in a way this was a put down to Eisenhower, and he was trying to make the point that in peacetime Eisenhower never really could accomplish much and somehow MacArthur was better than that. But Eisenhower turned out to be a pretty darn good President.

There are other examples. One of the ones that fascinates me is that we've had three generals in our history who have gone on to be Secretaries of State and they've all been pretty good ones. George Marshall was a four star general, chief of staff of the Army, and he went on to become Secretary of State. In the post-World War II years he created what was called the Marshall Plan which most people credit saving Western Europe from Communism. And Alexander Haig became Secretary of State. We all know about him and some of his exploits. Today my good friend Colin Powell, someone who I've worked with four or five times in my military career, is Secretary of State. Look at the stereotypes that Colin has broken as a leader. Born of Jamaican American parents here in the New York area, rose through the Army. I personally knew him when he was a one star General in the Pentagon. I worked for him there. I worked for him during the time when I was at the White House. Towards the end of my time in the Reagan Administration he came over and became National Security Advisor and later when I was a general he was the commander of U.S. Forces in Europe and was my boss and also as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Clearly he is a leader who excelled in both peace and war and is now one of the rocks of the current Administration.

So a lot of leadership has to do with where you are, what's going on round you and what your qualities are. Leadership has rewards too. We were talking at dinner tonight, a lot of people, especially successful people, forget how America is really structured. The average income in the United States when you average it all out is twenty-seven thousand dollars per person. That is low compared to what most professional people make. Young students in this class will make when they graduate many times that. That marks you right away as separate from the average American person. Whether you see yourself as a leader or not you are already put into a leadership path by virtue of the quality of the education you receive at this institution. The median income for a family in the United States is forty-two thousand dollars. Forty-two thousand two hundred dollars. Now let's look at what some of the money that certain leaders in various parts of our society make. Alex Rodriguez who's a shortstop for the Seattle Mariners has a salary contract for $242 million. $242 million! Remember now if he were just John Q citizen it would be twenty-seven thousand a year. Kevin Garner, he's a basketball player, $126 million. Shaquille O'Neal, a ten-year contract for $208 million. Tiger Woods made $8 million in 2000 just in winning a golf contest. He got $54 million of endorsements and recently signed a $100 million contract with Nike. Bill Gates is worth $32 billion, the head of Microsoft. Oprah Winfrey gets $200 million a year. Jerry Seinfeld, $100 million. Tom Cruise makes $80 million a year. Julia Roberts, her gross from the last ten moves was $104 million. So when you are in leadership, whether it's in sports or the movies or certain parts of industry, you're going to be widely separated from the average American by a huge amount.

One of the structural problems we have in our society today is we don't pay our government leaders anything near what we pay for the folk leaders in our society. You heard the hundred of millions of dollars for movie stars, baseball players, football players and so on. Members of Congress receive a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year! It is entirely possible that some of the smartest graduates in this class might get offered pay within the first four or five years of their careers in the hundred and fifty thousand category. When I hire young engineers to work for me today its in the hundred thousand plus - to do aerospace engineering. The President of the United States only makes four hundred thousand dollars a year. Now that might sound like an astronomical amount to you today but compared to the kinds of leadership that you see in industry, it's practically nothing, practically nothing. And indeed, some of the scandals that we see in our government come from the notion that leaders depend on the money they're going to make after they leave leadership positions to really make their fortune. And so is it any wonder that the American public sees a link between national leadership and the business community? This is why we have problems like some of the investigations that go on in Washington all the time. But my point to you is that leadership has big rewards if you really truly are a leader, both in business, sports, movies and so on. And it's worth fighting for if money is what you want or are interested in. If you want power, on the other hand, you want to go into the government or do something like that. Which is where there is a lot of power. You're not going to see the same kind of monetary rewards. And that is, in fact, a problem in a democracy.

I'm not here tonight to offer a solution to it, but it's something that over the long haul I would argue we're going to have to deal with in terms of our national leadership structure. Leadership also has a down side to it. It has a dark side. Those of you that have seen the Star Wars movies know the great theme of what happens to Luke Skywalker is that he gets "seduced" by the dark side. There are huge sacrifices in leadership. When I was a young man, there was a song by Harry Chapin called "Cat's in the Cradle." Some of you may have heard of it. The phrase is "my child arrived just the other day, came into the world in the usual way, but there were planes to catch and bills to pay. He learned to walk while I was away, and he was talking before I knew and as he grew, he'd say I'm going to be like you dad, you know I'm going to be like you." And the point of this song, it goes on, this is very much in tune with the culture of the sixties, was that this child grew up without really knowing who his parents were because his parents were always out making money and doing other things, and when the parent became older he wanted to receive love and attention from the child. The child turned to him and said I don't have time dad. There are planes to catch and things to do and so on. And it's about the alienation within families. And this is a fact. Leaders have this problem.

If you look at the children of leaders, almost universally, you find difficult problems. Look what's happening to Jeb Bush down in Florida today. His daughter is in the drug treatment program. Often times we find the children of movies stars or sports people or senior people in government have a very, very difficult time with their lives because their parents aren't there. Because they're working very hard.

When I was a young officer I had a very exciting assignment in Southeast Asia. We were talking about it at dinner tonight. I was in charge of a covert detachment, which was working with the Agency and Air Force Intelligence to do some very exciting and spooky things behind the lines in Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia and all of those places. I was twenty-four years old. It was very, very exciting. But I had been recently married, and I had two children at home. And my wife decided she was against the war. She left the children with my mother and when I came home I was a single parent with no wife. And neither one of my children knew who that guy was because I'd been gone for two years. My son was four years old. He had an inkling of who I was and he would attach himself to me because I was the only thing he had. My little daughter, who's eighteen-nineteen months old, she didn't know me from Adam. There was a price to pay for my leadership role even though it was the right thing to do. It was the thing that I had to do as a young officer.

When I was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, this is many years later, I was a bachelor for many years and as Ron knows, I got married about eight years ago and had another family. Two little boys, one now is six and one is four, and I made damn sure I was going to be there when they learned to walk and they said their first words and they did things. So I used to bring my kids into the Pentagon. That was a very strange thing to see in this very serious atmosphere of the Pentagon, little kid running down the hall. One of my most favorite memories is that my son learned that he could go over the Commandant of the Marine Corps office and that they kept chocolate over there. And he would get it - you know how little kids eat chocolate. It would be all over his face and all over his hands. One day there was a series of very senior Navy leaders in my office and they had on these beautiful white uniforms. And the Vice CNO of the Navy was there to see me, and he saw this little child come in with all this chocolate over him and the Vice CNO actually leaped up from my couch and said, "get this kid away from me." But I did that because I was working seven o'clock in the morning until eight or nine o'clock at night. I used to bring my aides home with me at night, about six, seven o'clock before my children went to bed so I could spend a little bit of time with my son and my Navy and Marine Corps aides would eat pizza out in our dining room while I was putting my sons to bed and then we'd sit in my living room, let's say eight until midnight signing the papers. The point is leadership has a lot of sacrifices.

People can look at the lives of really bad people like Adolf Hitler for example. If you've ever read the history of Adolf Hitler. In World War I it wasn't clear at all that he would turn out the way he did. He was sort of a valiant young soldier in the German Army in World War I. Somehow, somewhere along the way he got what affects many leaders, not just in places like Germany or in other countries. It happens here all the time too. They begin to kind of come to the conclusion that the things that affect our lives, the rules that we all have to go by, common decency, respect for one another, respect for other people's ideas, don't apply to them, and only their ideas are the correct ideas. This was the whole idea that Mein Kampf was based on. His idea of superiority in the German race over all the rest of us was what led him and his nation to its destruction. And along the way six million Jews got gassed, and over twenty million innocent victims in this world were killed. All because of the evil leadership of a single person!

We've seen other examples in recent years. I've got here in my notes that this sometimes applies to religious leaders. You remember the guy that went down to Guyana, Jim Jones, and he convinced all of these innocent people who were there for religious reasons, believed in his leadership and tried to make a new life. He convinced them all to take poison and kill themselves. The one that's in the news every day now is Saddam Hussein. Here's a person that purports to be a defender of the Muslim faith but he gasses his own people. He has personally killed hundreds and hundreds of his political opposition in Iraq over the years. A really, really evil person. Was he always that way? You go back to his early career; you don't see the signs as a young officer in the Iraqi Army that he would turn out to be what he is today. So as a leader we have to be careful because, not unlike what you see in the movies and in Star Wars there is an evil side and people who are leaders can be tempted to move in that direction.

Leadership also has a tragic side to it. It's safe to be a follower most of the time. We all can be victims of innocent and random violence like the sniper's victims down in Washington. But most often the victims of violent crimes and things turn out to be people that are leaders. And this goes all the way back to the beginning of time. You can pick any period to start. Start with Jesus Christ. What happened to him? The Romans crucified him. He was a religious leader who had new ideas about where to lead his people. And he spawned what is possibly the strongest, biggest religion in the world today. Maybe it's not the biggest anymore because of the growth of the population in the East and so on, but clearly Christianity has been the driving force in Western civilization for the past two thousand years. And he died for his beliefs. All of his disciples - all but one or two were killed in various violent ways.

When women began to assert their roles in leadership, what happened to most of the early women leaders? You know, what happened to Joan of Arc in France. Marie Antoinette in France. And others.

Here in America we've seen this downside of leadership since the beginning of our country. Some of the ones that come to mind, one of our greatest Presidents that we all are taught to revere as young students, is Abraham Lincoln. One of the most God fearing sort of honest, thoughtful people in American society. Someone who was willing to forgive the South for all that happened and wanted to put the hand of friendship out, was killed by this nut in Washington just when he had brought the country through this great terrible civil war. Assassinated in 1865. Martin Luther King, assassinated in 1968. And this goes on around the world. Anwar Sadat probably the greatest President Egypt has had in modern times, assassinated. Prime Minister Rabin in Israel assassinated. President Kennedy here in the United States.

People mark their lives by certain things like probably for the current generation you will always remember where you were on September 11th and what happened on that day. That's going to be burned into your mind. Probably you rushed to a TV set to see those horrible pictures of those burning buildings and the people falling out and all the horror of that day. So it will mark your lives. It's certainly a mark in my life but in my early life I remember the day John Kennedy was shot. I know exactly where I was and what I was doing, and that's an example of the tragic side.

We've had situations in modern times that are not unlike what happened in Nazi Germany. In Cambodia a whole generation of leadership was wiped out. They were sent to the death camps in Cambodia for simple things like you wore glasses. You wore glasses they figured you were a leader. You had enough money to buy a pair of glasses. So they worked you to death. And the whole idea was to try to stamp out - there'd been - the Cambodian experience is a good example that you've seen several times in eastern societies this idea that you could somehow stamp out leadership. This never worked anywhere its ever been tried. The Chinese Army after the Chinese Revolution in China abolished rank in the Army. So everybody was supposed to be the same rank. Well, you know that's great within a small unit when you really know who the lieutenant is even though they're all wearing the same kind of Mao suit. But you get the troops mixed up a little bit and nobody knew who the hell was in charge. It was a disaster. And so when you go see the Chinese Army - I've been to China a number of times - they have these gaudy uniforms with bright stars on them and everything. Rank has to be identified.

We've also seen some very tragic sides of leadership recently. Some of the maritime that we all know about is the tradition that captains go down with their ship. You know the captain of the Titanic. There have been a number of examples of that. But in my lifetime one of the ones that tugs at my heartstrings is the suicide of Mike Boorda, our CNO. And he was there, Ron knew him just as I did. I have a picture on my desk taken the day before he killed himself. He and I spent a lot of time together. There was no hint of the fact that he would kill himself. But here was a man who came up through the ranks and was treated not very fairly by those snootier Navy officers who went to the Academy who looked down their nose on him because he didn't go to the Academy. He wasn't one of what's called the ring knockers who, you know, stick together. I'm not knocking the Academy but I'm going to just tell you here was the kind of leadership up from the ranks that didn't fit in with the rest of the group. And a guy who when challenged by a reporter, wrongly challenged by the way, because it turns out later that he was not illegally wearing some little funny decoration on his uniform - was so despondent about what he thought was a loss of face and so on that he committed suicide.

It just turns out as I was coming down here to speak to you all tonight I was on the Delta shuttle, and I got on early and sat down in my seat. Along came a familiar face that I worked for in the White House. Bud McFarland. You young students probably won't know who that person is, but the older generation will know that he was the National Security Advisor under President Reagan. He was my boss at the White House and when "Ollie Gate" came along and all these revelations about Ollie North's shenanigans in Iran and so on, he was removed from office - or he quit - because of the terrible scandal that was affecting the Reagan Administration and attempted suicide himself. These are people who rose to very high levels of leadership, but because of the tragic circumstances around them actually decided to take their lives.

In the Clinton Administration there was the example of Vincent Foster, his political advisor. Nobody to this day knows why he went out to Fort Marcy and shot himself. There's all kind of rumors that somebody killed him and so on. But most people know that it was his sense of failure that he had failed the President in some way. So leadership has a tragic side as well.

It also has a funny side too. Who among us cannot remember Vice-President Quayle not knowing that potato didn't have an E on the end? I didn't look up some of Quayle's other gaffes, but he was pretty famous for making some pretty stupid statements. I did find some that Vice President Gore has said, and I'll read a couple of them to you. One of them that strikes me as interesting is when he says "that people are really weird can get into sensitive leadership positions and have a tremendous impact on history." And most people thought maybe he was talking about himself. He also said the following. "A low voter turn out is an indication of fewer people going to the polls." One time in a meeting, he was famous for exaggerating what he'd done in his life, - it just so happens Mrs. Clinton was in this meeting. He said, "Welcome to President Clinton, Mrs. Clinton and my fellow astronauts." And everybody knows Gore was not an astronaut. And once he said "what a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind." George W. said the following. He's famous for saying really dumb things. He said that if you're worried about caribou, take a look at the arguments that were used about the Alaska Pipeline. "They'd say the caribou would be extinct. Well I've been up there and I can tell you you have to shake them away with a stick. They're all up there making love, lying up against that pipeline and because of that you've got thousand of little caribou out there." I don't know whoever told him to say that, but it was a pretty bad speechwriter or one out of control. His father once said, "fluency in English is something that I'm often not accused of." One of my favorites that his dad says, "it has been said by some cynic that - maybe it was a former President - if you want a friend in Washington get a dog. Well, we took him literally and I got Barbara Bush." He actually said that. He didn't mean to say that but that's how it came out. Hillary Clinton once said, and this goes into the category of exaggeration in a visit to Australia and New Zealand, she claimed in a speech that she'd been named after Sir Edmond Hillary after his famous trip where he climbed Mt. Everest. And somebody went back and calculated that she was born six years before he scaled Mt. Everest. So there was no way she could have been named after Sir Edmond Hillary. So there is a funny side to leadership, a tragic side.

I want to give you a chance to ask me some questions if you have any. And they don't have to be about leadership. They can be about my career or what's going on in Washington or whatever you want to talk about. I often give lectures at college and I find that's where I interact well is in the question and answer. I do want to conclude with a couple of thoughts for you, and that is that never underestimate what's going to happen to you in your life. Never. If I could move myself back to when I was your age in college, at the University of Florida working my way through school, if somebody would have told me I was going to end up being a General, I was going to end up being an advisor to the President of the United States or an advisor to a great Senator like Senator Sam Nunn, or that I would end up being Assistant Secretary of the Navy. My father was a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy and I thought rising to the grand rank of Lieutenant Commander was like God. I would have never in a million years thought that my life would take me through these twists and turns. So don't ever, ever underestimate your own leadership qualities! And remember, to be a good leader you have to be a good follower. You will never in your life ever reach a leadership position in which you don't have a boss. There's always a boss. You always have to follow somebody's directions. Even if you're the President of the United States you have to deal with the U.N. Ultimately you've got to deal with God, unless you really think you're higher than that you're always going to have a boss.

Once you get married you're going to find in that relationship there's usually a boss, and you might not be the boss in that relationship. So don't underestimate yourself. Learn how to be a good follower and remember that what you're about to do, the profession that you're in being maritime engineers is a profession, which marks you as very special in our country. We are a great maritime nation. A great maritime nation. So much of our lives depends on the flow of commerce that goes on ships. And the defense of our country that comes from our United States Navy. And this little small school, sixty-seven people, sixty-seven students in this school, somewhere in here one of you may be the future head of a great American shipbuilding company. If you were to decide later in your life to go into the Navy you might be CNO. You might be Secretary of the Navy. I never thought ever in my wildest dreams I would be the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. But my name is often mentioned in Washington as a potential future Secretary of the Navy. Never underestimate where your life is going to lead you. You're in a great school. You've got a wonderful opportunity. I don't know each of you as individuals. I don't know what brought you here. But you live in probably the best country in the world. And you've got a wonderful institution here and God has given you these wonderful gifts. Just do the best you can and leadership counts. That's my final thought. So let me turn it over to Q and A.

Q: What is your greatest source of strength in all your leadership roles?

A: My greatest source of strength in my leadership roles. Well I would say early in my life it was probably in my gut to work hard to try to succeed. I came from a Chief Petty Officer's family. We didn't have much. I ran away from home when I was sixteen. I learned very early in life that if I was going to make some mark on life, find a way to be self-sufficient, I had to work hard. Because nobody was going to give it to me. There was no family, no room for whatever. I would say later in life probably my greatest strength is my religious beliefs. You get to a certain point in life where you begin to think about what the big picture's all about. And I have to be honest and say I wasn't nearly as religious when I was younger. I've always been sort of religious but not the way I am today. Early in my life it was the desire to prove that I could make it or whatever. Today I think my greatest strength is my trusting, and being thankful for what the Lord has given me. Trusting in His plans for the future. Other questions. That was a hard one. Yes sir.

Q: What role does risk taking play?

A: Risk taking plays a huge role. That's a wonderful question. You're never going to get to be a really, really successful leader unless you know how to deal with risk. All the really important military leaders who had great success knew how to deal with risk. This is why Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and some of the great Confederate Generals just whipped the Yankees every battle right up through 1863. Because the Federal officers were very conservative and the Confederates were outgunned, out manned, and they had to take great risks. And those risks paid off. Later in the war, they were just ground down by numbers. You look at World War II and other American military examples; you'll see that the risk takers always were the ones with very high success. MacArthur's invasion of Inchon in Korea for example. The D-Day gamble Ike took with the weather on the sixth of June. All of these were great risk taking Generals.

I'll tell you an interesting story. When I was a general at NATO I used to get together with a group of other generals, who for some reason or another didn't have their wives with them. Several of them were widows. In my case I'd been single for a number of years. So these sort of unattached generals used to get together for dinner. And one night we were all having dinner in, and I like to gamble. I'd recently been to a casino in Belgium, and I was talking about the differences between European casinos and American casinos. Several of these European officers said to me, one of them I remember was the German General, "Well, we are not allowed to go in the casinos, officers are not allowed to lower themselves to gambling." And one of the other Generals, I don't know Dutch or something said, "gee, why is that?" Why aren't you? And this German general said, "we do not need to know why. It's the rule. We follow the rules." And the French general said, "well maybe if you guys would take a few risks you might win a war." It's an unfair comment because early in the war the Germans did take big risks but an interesting difference in cultures. And it's true, in some European armies, military are not allowed to go into the casinos. The whole idea is that gambling and risk taking is somehow sinful and they shouldn't be doing that.

One of the funny stories that happened to me was that - I was telling Ron tonight, while I was in Europe there were three attempts to kidnap me. And each time in various ways I got away from the kidnappers. And some of you who recall the events of the Gulf War may remember seeing this on CNN. It was covered quite a bit by CNN about these attacks on this American general in Europe and I was that general. And so as time wore on I had to have more and more bodyguards around me all the time. So when I would go into a casino these bodyguards would go with me. These young soldiers. After some months one of the sergeants who was in charge of the guard detail came around to me and said "General, I have to talk to you." And I said fine. And he said "you gotta stop taking those young soldiers into those casinos." And I said why? He said, "Because they go back after you leave and they lose all their money." And he said either you have to teach them how to gamble or don't go. Because they'd see me winning and then they'd go and lose and they didn't really understand the rules. Everybody who knows anything about casinos knows they make most of their money off suckers who don't understand the odds and don't know how to play the risks. Other questions. About the war. About Washington. Yes sir.

Q: Do you think Eisenhower was correct in warning us to beware of the military-industrial complex?

A: Yeah. That's another - these are really great questions. You know I've been on all sides of that. Government, industry, civilian government, military government and I've heard people go back and analyze that speech and I apologize for not being able to quote it. But the idea that Eisenhower was warning the country about some great evil in industry is not in the overall context of the speech. So he was making the point, though, that sometimes if this situation is not watched properly, bad things can happen. We've all seen examples of that. In my time one of the most interesting things that happened to me, Ron alluded to it a little bit in the introduction, was I happened to be in the White House on President Reagan's staff at the time of the big procurement scandals in the middle 1980's. Having been a procurement expert early in my career, I was aware of some of the structural flaws that we had in our government procurement system. But they - the ones that were coming out in the newspapers weren't the real flaws. The problem with it was that reporters love to find like a toilet seat they paid too much for and make a big deal out of that or a hammer or a nut or a bolt and its true, people did make mistakes and often you know in our system, our great bureaucracy, people are asked to buy things for the government and they get an order where it says something like, aerospace sanitary device for aeronautical systems and they think this must be some complex machine for taking care of waste for astronauts. So they see the price of four, five hundred dollars and they think that's not too bad. They don't realize you're buying a toilet seat. Why don't you just write toilet seat on there? And this has been a problem within our government for a long time. It goes all the way back to the Revolution.

But the real area where billions are lost is somebody starts a huge project and we go out and spend twenty, thirty billion dollars and then we don't build it. We just give up on it before we get the benefits of it. You very seldom hear real criticism of these gigantic mistakes. While I was there one of the contributions I made to the Reagan Administration is I recommended to the President that he get Dave Packard who was one of America's great - started Hewlett Packard from his garage as a student at Stanford University and built it into the multi-billion dollar corporation it is, and was also a man of impeccable integrity. And so I had the pleasure to serve on the Packard Commission. And Packard pointed out that really when we harness America's innovativeness and we find ways for industry and government to work together in the partnership is when we do the best for our country. But we recommended lots of structural changes in the way some of these big programs were run. Basically to force the leadership to take more responsibility for the outcome of these projects and to have fewer and fewer layers of leadership in these big projects that were going on. So I think Eisenhower was reflecting on a period of time in which he was worried that the system that had to be put in place in order to deter the Soviet Union - remember now Eisenhower left office at a time when the Soviet Union was reaching its zenith of power. Everybody knew that we were going to have to go through a long period of huge expenditures for our military to keep that power under control. He was worried about the industrial part of it getting out of whack. It was a legitimate worry but it wasn't, I don't think, because he felt industry leaders were dishonest or crooked or whatever. He just knew that that amount of money could lead to serious mistakes. It's a great, great question though.

I've studied Eisenhower quite a bit. One of the interesting things that I did when I was at the White House is one of those things where if you tell the whole story they have to kill you, but there is a room in the White House - not many people know this - in which top-secret code word documents are kept. We have programs in our government that we don't admit exist. These are called the Black Programs. For example, the Stealth fighter - the Stealth bomber that I worked on as a young engineer - we had them for many years before we admitted we had them. We didn't let anybody know we had Stealth. As a matter of fact, if you read a book, there are a number of books that have been written in recent years about things that have happened to me in Washington, which I play a little role in the book. But there's one book, Nightingale's Song, it's about five graduates from the Naval Academy; McFarland, North, Webb, Poindexter and McCain. If you read the Nightingale's Song there's a little part in there about this Colonel Douglass at the White House who recommended to President Reagan that we take the Stealth fighter and use that on the raid on Ghadaffi. Some people thought that's why they were trying to kidnap me in Europe. That these were Libyans who knew about my role in planning the raid, and they were trying to get me back for some reason. That probably was not in because the most likely reason they were trying to kidnap me was because I was an expert on the Stealth, and I'd also been involved in the development of the Tomahawk Cruise Missile. The Stealth bomber and the Cruise Missile were the two things that were going downtown Baghdad at the height of the war. But anyway, we have this room in the White House where all these top secret things are kept and no one is allowed to go in there except for one or two people. That was one of the interesting jobs that I had. Somebody had to occasionally go in there and read things and try to make a recommendation about whether they should be declassified or not. Because you would often get Freedom of Information requests from writers and historians who would want to know what happened in this national security meeting of such and such a time and so. During the time of the latter part of Eisenhower's Administration, there were lots of studies done about the impact of nuclear war and what the United States should do. Some of those studies were really, really horrific. About how many would be killed in the United States, or Europe or in Asia if we got into a global war. They were so bad. One of the most interesting documents I ever ran across and one I can partially share with you, was one where President Kennedy was briefed on what was in this room and some of the papers and things in there and he wrote on a piece of paper to his - I think McGeorge Bundy who was National Security Advisor, he wrote on the margins of the paper which he must have given to Bundy, he said get these guys out of here and don't ever let them back in. He did not want to dwell on the impact of nuclear war in the same way that Eisenhower did. Eisenhower was a military man. He believed that he had to know all the implications. Kennedy had a much bigger - sort of broader view of things and he didn't want to dwell on all those horrible facts. Very interesting part of my job when I was there. To get a little insight into Ike versus Kennedy. Yes sir.

Q: What do you think are the merits of attacking Iraq?

A: The question is "What do I think of the merits of attacking Iraq in the present environment?" Well, at one end of the spectrum you have to start with the idea, are we gonna - do you have to deal with Saddam sooner or later. Most people think that at some point in time this guy is so evil that we are going to have to do something. That leads you to the logic path that the President has been pursuing and that's sooner is better because the longer you wait the more probability there is that he's going to develop some way to greatly damage the United States involving nuclear weapons and germ warfare or something of that nature. There is another school of thought that says wait a minute here. Since when did the United States get appointed as the keeper of the world? And it is the principle that some American leaders decide somebody else in the world is a bad guy enough to bring the weight of America's strength to eliminate that other person. And most - I will tell you, most of the rest of the world believes that we're on the wrong track here. My own personal belief is that I would not want to see the President rush into this. I don't think he is rushing into it. But I don't think the American people have bought into this to the degree that he has the support that he needs to get us in a full scale war is one point. I don't think we have made our case to our allies. Now how long can you try to make your case - you know as things get worse and worse? I don't know. But one of the tests of history that he's going to have to deal with, and this is again folks the heavy, heavy burden of leadership. When the day is over he can listen to Colin Powell, he can listen to Rumsfeld, he can listen to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but in the end he's got to make that decision. When is the right time if he's going to do something? And what is the right basic method. When you're in these top jobs you don't always get good advice. One book that I love most of all is Seven Days in May. I know this to be a credible story because I read the minutes of the National Security Council meetings during that time period when I was at the White House, but one time President Kennedy asked General LeMay how many of the missiles in Cuba could he take out on the first raid. He said a hundred percent Mr. President. We'll take them all out on the first raid. He said how many airplanes are you going to use and LeMay said some number like a hundred. So then the President called in one of the commanders that had to actually go execute the raid, and he said what percentage of the Cuban missiles could you take out with a hundred bombers. And the guy said twenty percent. So here you had the commander of the Strategic Air Command, a general, telling the President one thing and the guy that had to go do the mission telling him something completely different. That is not an unusual thing folks. When you hear the debate that went on around that table that Kennedy had to deal with in the Cuban Missile Crisis, you're going to see a wide variety of opinions, and I think President Bush is in that same mode today. I know Colin Powell very well. He's a close personal friend and I know Colin is telling him slow down Mr. President. And Rumsfeld is telling him speed up Mr. President. And God knows who is in between there. I think you'd probably find most of the uniformed military that are about my age saying slow down. The military officer corps today is not a militant officer corps. We have all - most of them have all been like me. They served in Vietnam. They served in other conflicts since then and they know what war and death is about and they're not eager to trivially get into it. But only in the end can the President make that. My own personal opinion is I hope he thinks long and hard before he gets to the point where young men and women and the inevitable loss of life among Iraqi civilians takes place.

How about one from the students here. Come on boys and girls. There's one brave young man. Okay.

Q: Can you tell us about Area 51?

A: Yeah. This is a great way to end the lecture folks. When I was on the National Security Counsel staff - of course I know what goes on in Area 51. One day I got called over to the President's office and President Reagan, once he got to know you was a wonderful man. I had the deepest personal affection for him. I'm not trying to portray myself in any way as close advisor whatever. I was just a young colonel there. I was their technical expert but I had a chance to brief him on many occasions and he knew who I was. He liked to talk to the young military officers on the National Security Council staff and so if he had a question he was not above calling me over there to check on it. He knew that I was the guy that was privy to all of these top-secret code word programs. A friend of his had seen a program on CNN about a flying saucer incident in Brentwaters, England, in which supposedly this flying saucer had come down and landed and scared all the Air Force guys and so on. So he called me over there and he said, "This friend of mine in California called me and said he saw this thing on CNN. What do you think John?" And I said "Well sir, I haven't seen the piece but I said it sounds like BS to me sir." And he said, "Well why don't you go see it and tell me what you think." And so I went to the White House. There's an agency at the White House called WHCA - White House Communications Agency. These are the people that keep the President in constant touch with the Armed Forces, so if he has to push the button he can do it no matter where he is at the time. But they do all kinds of other things. Like they tape all kinds of TV shows that the President might want to see. And I went to WHCA and said, "Have you got this UFO thing. Did you tape it?" And they said, "No, he would never want to see that." So I went "oh, I'm not going to tell them that he did want to see this one." You know, somebody would go blabbing around "Ronald Reagan believes in little green men." So I had to go down to CNN to get a copy of this. We had a public affairs lady there on the White House staff named Colonel Small who used to be an anchorwoman for CBS and I kind of made an appointment for me to go down to see this thing at CNN headquarters in Washington. When I got down there they were waiting for me. This is called an ambush interview. I walked in the door and this guy jumps out with a microphone and he said, "This is Colonel Douglass from the White House and he's here to review this program we saw and obviously the White House is taking this very seriously." And so I started using a lot of profanity because I know they couldn't run it on TV and I said this is all BS. Only I didn't say BS I said the real words and I said this is totally - and I won't even tell you what else I said. But I said so much profanity that I knew they couldn't use it. So then they said stop the tape. Stop it. Then I went in and I sat down and I watched it. They said, "Well what do you think?" And I said, "that's all baloney, and you guys are nuts." - you think little green men exist? And they said, "well why did you come down to see it?" And I did tell a white lie then. I didn't in any way intimate the President. I said, "somebody told me about it and you know I'm the technical guy and I wanted to - I didn't see it so I wanted to see it in case anybody asked me questions." So when I went back to the White House they said to me the normal thing to do in a case like that would be to write a note back to the President. But you can't just go back to the Oval and say sir it's me, or stop the cabinet meeting to hear the story. And so my boss said, "send him a note." And I said "no way sir, no way. I'm not putting this in writing." And they said, "well why not?" And I said, "Well you know somebody will request it and then we'll be on the dilemma. We'll have to classify it to keep it away from the public, which is really not the right thing to do. Or people would think that Ronald Reagan believes in little green men." And so he said, "oh yeah-good idea John." So the next morning - and I often would go in to see the President right after breakfast. He and Mrs. Reagan - one of my jobs was to bring in these big satellite photos of the Russians and explain what it was. That's a whole other funny story there. But anyway I went back a few days later, and I said to the President, "This is all baloney. I don't know who your friend in California is but what you need to tell him that I guarantee you there's no little men - no little green men in Area 51 and this thing in Brentwaters is probably some kind of local hysteria and maybe people playing tricks on the security police or whatever." And so it was forgotten until about thirty days later we started getting requests for the Douglass report. Freedom of Information Request. And so for a long time I was kind of a cult person in the little green men world. People would stop me and say we know you wrote that down. And so we never did do it. Sort of the quintessential end to this story is that one night I was at a party. I had used to date a woman that was a very high-powered stockbroker in New York City. I was at a very posh Manhattan party and I ran into a mayor of a city that will go unnamed. It just happened to be a female mayor. And she started on this Area 51 business and when she realized I was the Douglass of the famous Douglass Report she really got on me and I had an opportunity to tease her a lot and say, "You'd better back off or I'll start calling the newspaper in your home town and tell them you think there's little green men in Area 51." Pretty soon she got the idea this wasn't a good a thing to do.

KISS: John, I'd like to thank you very much for an excellent presentation. I think everybody can tell why I thought you'd be a wonderful speaker. I, too, learned a great deal tonight including personal insights, some of which I've never heard about before and also your historical stories. One thing that I was nervous about when you were talking about the dark side - and you covered it very nicely - is there are a lot of positive things about leadership and I think your talk amply provided examples of the positive things about leadership.

[TAPE GETS TOO LOW TO HEAR]

Mr. Kiss presented some mementos to Mr. Douglass and invited all present to retire to the Reception Room for some informal conversation, and further questions for Mr. Douglass.