| Speaker | Time | Text |
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Federal Reserve's Role
00:14:59
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| Should we have public funding elections? | ||
| Should we have the kind of, if you live here and vote here, you can donate here ideas that we've heard today. | ||
| Most countries, most democracies, all of them as far as I'm aware, have the constitutional ability to debate those ideas. | ||
| Many of them have implemented those ideas. | ||
| We are an outlier, and it's not because we love free speech more. | ||
| We do love free speech more. | ||
| Most Americans, as the poll you mentioned, Mimi, The overwhelming Americans, 50 years the court has been saying, oh, this is free speech. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is free speech. | |
| Most Americans are saying, no, it is not free speech. | ||
| We love free speech. | ||
| We'd like to have more of it. | ||
| So let's stop drowning out the voices of the people. | ||
| And so that idea of free speech is the one that is really recognized in these different kinds of ideas about how elections should be funded. | ||
| And I think it's the way Americans would like to go too. | ||
| It's the way we did go before the Supreme Court invented this theory. | ||
| We had these kind of different approaches, different rules that made the people have much more of a voice and the government be more responsive to the people. | ||
| That's Jeff Clements. | ||
| He is co-founder and CEO of American Promise. | ||
| You can find them at AmericanPromise.net. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, Mimi. | |
| And thanks to everybody who watched and called in. | ||
| That's it for us today. | ||
| We'll see you again tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
|
unidentified
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President Trump announced this morning he's nominating financier and economic scholar Kevin Warsh to be the next Federal Reserve chair after Jerome Powell's term ends in May. | |
| In a post on Truth Social, the president writes, quote, I have known Kevin for a long period of time and have no doubt that he will go down as one of the great Fed chairmen, maybe the best. | ||
| On top of everything else, he is central casting and he will never let you down. | ||
| The nomination of Mr. Warsh will be considered by the Senate with support from a majority of senators needed to be confirmed. | ||
| After the president's announcement, North Carolina Republican Senator Tom Tillis said he'll continue to oppose the confirmation of any Federal Reserve nominee until the Justice Department's criminal investigation into the current chair is, quote, fully and transparently resolved. | ||
| Chairman Powell revealed earlier this month he's being investigated by the Trump administration over his testimony on the renovation costs of the central bank's headquarters. | ||
| President Trump has repeatedly called for the Fed to lower interest rates. | ||
| The president's nominee, Mr. Warsh, has served previously as a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011. | ||
| He was nominated by President Bush at the age of 35, becoming the youngest Fed appointee in the history of the agency. | ||
| As a private citizen, Mr. Warsh has experience in the financial industry and currently works as an economic scholar at Stanford University. | ||
| Up next, we'll show his remarks from last year on the central bank's independence and policies on cryptocurrency from an economic forum hosted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. | ||
| Kevin, I want to turn to you. | ||
| There has been a lot of talk over the years that, well, you know, why should we not have a digital dollar, right? | ||
| Should the central bank issue a digital currency to circulate alongside the dollars that we hold in our wallets? | ||
| And people have advanced a variety of arguments why this would be democratizing and so on. | ||
| Other countries, China most notably, have done that. | ||
| What's your view? | ||
| Should the Federal Reserve get into the game of issuing a digital dollar? | ||
| And if not, what is the Fed's appropriate role in this space? | ||
| So in a word, no. | ||
| In several words, first, it's an honor to be here. | ||
| I always wondered what the shining city on the hill looked like, and it's pretty cool to see it once for my own eyes. | ||
| For French, this is a little old home week because he served at the time that the president was in office. | ||
| For most of us who came into government, guys like Farrier and me and some in the crowd, you know, Reagan was our hero when we were kids, and I would say, and for many of us, we wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be in public policy without his example. | ||
| I'll say one other thing that I promise I'll come back with a longer answer than no to Greg's question. | ||
| This is our Reagan moment. | ||
| It was 44 years ago at a time like this. | ||
| President's in office, the media is giving him hell, he's shaking up the establishment, he inherits a mess. | ||
| People don't like what he's doing. | ||
| There's some gauzy history about how easy it was. | ||
| French can speak to it better than I. | ||
| It wasn't easy. | ||
| And this is that moment. | ||
| This is that hinge point in history that we see every couple of generations. | ||
| Doesn't make it going to be easy, doesn't mean that every decision is obvious, but it's super exciting. | ||
| So that's my thank you to the Reagan folks. | ||
| On Greg's question, the idea of a central bank digital currency works well for the CCP who want a five-year plan to control their people. | ||
| I think it's ahistorical and, frankly, anti-American. | ||
| The central bank has plenty of responsibilities in the United States. | ||
| I, for one, would like them to be a narrowly focused central bank, making sure that we have stable prices as a condition precedent to full employment, not wandering into other areas. | ||
| And there was some impetus for the central bank here and in some other Western countries to establish this. | ||
| I can think of few things more dangerous than if 300 million Americans had the equivalent of a wallet at the Federal Reserve. | ||
| The next crisis happens, Congress acts slowly. | ||
| Lobbyists come to Washington and a bunch of politicians say, Well, we really can't fill those wallets. | ||
| Why don't you guys just do it? | ||
| This is against the grain of our constitutional republic. | ||
| I would have to think that Ronald Reagan himself would be outraged by it. | ||
| And the privacy that in America we take seriously would then be called into question with the central bank policing all these accounts. | ||
| Another problem, of course, with it is in the U.S., the strength of the economy is our private sector. | ||
| We don't need the central bank crowding into that anymore. | ||
| I'll just say one final point. | ||
| I think Farrier and Chairman Hill did the right way of describing this. | ||
| Cryptocurrency in Washington and much of the country sounds very scary. | ||
| Whoever named it that, I think, deserves demerits. | ||
| Crypto somehow means secret, and currency suggests it's money. | ||
| Well, what a misnomer. | ||
| It's software. | ||
| The coolest, neatest software that every 16-year-old on the planet wants to do all their work in. | ||
| Software can be used for good things and bad things. | ||
| I don't blame Excel if a spreadsheet is being used by a bunch of gangs, do I? | ||
| It's important, as French describes, that there be a clear regulatory framework so this software can find its way into the economy. | ||
| And as a final point, I would say we're probably on the front end of the use cases that Greg asked about. | ||
| In the future, probably not that far from now, a year, year and a half from now, we're all going to have these devices in our pockets like we do, but they're going to be our agents. | ||
| And they're going to go off and check in on our flights and see what the traffic's like and make sure the Uber is here to get us without a single instruction by us. | ||
| The only thing it doesn't right now have the capacity to do is actually verify that I am that person. | ||
| That agent is my agent. | ||
| Well, that use case is being made possible by the people sitting next to me. | ||
| This technology was pioneered in the United States, like AI, like much of the productivity boom that allowed the 80s and 90s to be there. | ||
| I think we're on the cusp of another productivity boom, as long as our government doesn't do harm to it, and as long as the central bank doesn't say, well, enough of this private sector, we'll do it for you. | ||
| You've written that while the Fed should not be issuing a consumer currency, it has a role to play in perhaps the issuance or management of a wholesale digital currency. | ||
| Can you elaborate on that? | ||
| How is that different? | ||
| Yeah, so it's radically different. | ||
| The banks do their business with the central bank. | ||
| Households and businesses do their business with the U.S. commercial banking system and a bunch of what we call unregulated financial institutions. | ||
| That's the two-tier system that is, I'd say, fits the American Republic exceptionally well. | ||
| But the Fed does have a lot of plumbing that we do in making sure that the conduct of monetary policy, those pipes work, that the infrastructure in the treasury markets work. | ||
| And that's what I think of as wholesale rails. | ||
| Well, those wholesale rails that our government has been using were created in the last century, are not done instantaneously. | ||
| Payments still take days, often weeks. | ||
| They're not verifiable. | ||
| They're subject to massive breakdowns. | ||
| They're not secured. | ||
| And we can't be perfectly certain exactly whether the counterparty is who we think it is. | ||
| Well, that's where the new software comes in. | ||
| I do think there's an important role for the Federal Reserve to help architect, outline what the new architecture should look like and to allow the private sector to build a wholesale new infrastructure using the coolest new software. | ||
| And it's not just for little gains of efficiency. | ||
| If you believe what I believe, and I suspect my colleagues up here believe, which is we want the dollar to continue to be the world's reserve currency, I believe our economy will be worthy of that over the course of the next decade and two. | ||
| And we need to have the best infrastructure so this is the place where people feel most comfortable conducting their transactions, not just between the banking sector and the government, but that's the backbone then for the rest of the private sector. | ||
| Kevin, let me come back to you, because I want to pick up on a point that you made in the earlier remarks, and it's a point you've made often, including at your remarks at the International Monetary Fund a month or so ago. | ||
| And you talked about essentially the Fed's, I was going to call it the mission creep, but in your view, it's more of like a mission race or a mission expansion. | ||
| It's like this vast multiplication of Fed responsibilities and facilities and so forth is a problem. | ||
| I think you've talked about a crowding out private sector activity. | ||
| And you said you referred to the Fed's balance sheet as in some sense a proxy for the perimeter of the Federal Reserve on the private economy. | ||
| It's around $7 trillion a consequence of quantitative easing, a program that began when you were on the board of governors. | ||
| Do you believe that the Federal Reserve, through that mechanism specifically, but in general, is posing a serious financial freedom and stability risk to the economy? | ||
| And what should be done about it? | ||
| I mean, what do we do about that giant balance sheet? | ||
| What should the Fed do? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So when I joined the Fed in 2006, I remember calling my dad and telling him I was going to do that. | ||
| First thing he said is, so you couldn't get a job in the private sector, could you? | ||
| I grew up in a small town. | ||
| And the only thing he knew, he was a small-town businessman, reasonably successful. | ||
| He said, oh, that's the thing that Greenspan runs. | ||
| So he knew about that. | ||
| Until the global financial crisis in 2008. | ||
| From the darkest days of that crisis where we went, as Chairman Volcker said, to the very edge of our powers to try to save the Republic from a massive depression, and we got very aggressive, and in my view, rightfully so. | ||
| The central bank was created in 1913 to respond to panics, much more so than to mess around with interest rates. | ||
| So it was aggressive moves. | ||
| But from that moment, really, until this day, the central bank has stayed on the front pages. | ||
| Instead of going on the front pages when the crisis hits in 08 or the pandemic hits in 2020, the central bank has become the most important economic institution in the world every day for all seasons and all reasons. | ||
| It wasn't that long ago that we would read about the central bank in an article Greg Ip would write a couple of his jobs ago. | ||
| Today the Federal Reserve met as they do every six weeks and they raised rates a quarter or cut them a quarter. | ||
| And it wasn't in everyone's lives. | ||
| The central bank has now decided, probably with the best of intentions, that they are going to play a more permanent role in the economy, in the business of banking, and I would also argue in the fiscal business of the country. | ||
| I'll use an example of that to tell the balance sheet story. | ||
| In 2008, in the darkest days of the financial crisis, as people in this room will remember, the markets were down 60, 70%. | ||
| The real economy was running away from us. | ||
| If the U.S. economy went down, the world was going to be in a bad place. | ||
| So we were willing to take some risks. | ||
| And we decided, after some major internal debate, we'd buy the bonds of our own government. | ||
| Secretary Paulson was issuing bonds on Tuesday and Wednesday, and we'd buy them on Thursday and Friday. | ||
| But we said to ourselves, when this crisis is over, we're not going to do this stuff again. | ||
| This isn't what the most important economy in the world does, but we really never put that tool away. | ||
| So the central bank's balance sheet today is an order of magnitude bigger than it was the day that I showed up. | ||
| So part of the reason why Chairman Hill and his colleagues in the Congress have had to witness this massive surge in fiscal spending over the last five years or the last 15 is your central bank was subsidizing the cost of it. | ||
| We were showing up, not just in crises, but in times of relative peace and prosperity and buying the bonds, hiding, camouflaging the full cost of spending. | ||
| As we sit here today, or the statistic is as of January, our federal government is spending 60% more money than the day before COVID, five years ago. | ||
| I hardly remember that being a time of like an efficient, austere government. | ||
| And we're spending 60% more, borrowing that money from people, some of whom don't like us, at prices we probably can't afford for projects we don't need in a time that we're at full employment. | ||
| The central bank has made that possible. | ||
| Not from a bad place, but from a good place. | ||
| And in some sense, they've taken on these powers. | ||
| This bigger central bank balance sheet crowds out the fiscal authorities, elected leaders like Chairman Hill, Treasury secretaries and governments, and has put them on the front pages. | ||
|
Government Spending Surge
00:11:47
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| My view is we should be on the front pages when we're in real trouble. | ||
| Otherwise, we should be back on page B12 of the newspaper. | ||
| One final point. | ||
| One of the consequences of this institutional drift into all sorts of business, climate policy and everything else, is the inflation that we've witnessed over the course of the last five years. | ||
| Now, for most of us in the room, it hasn't been that big of a deal. | ||
| We know it when we go to the grocery store, but we also own financial assets. | ||
| Maybe we own some Bitcoin. | ||
| 52% of our fellow Americans own no financial assets. | ||
| They don't have equity in their house. | ||
| They don't have an account at Schwab. | ||
| They don't have an account at Coinbase. | ||
| They're living off their W-2 income. | ||
| And this surge in prices have destroyed them. | ||
| It's the most regressive tax any government could ever come up with. | ||
| Imagine if we had a central bank that had been deadly focused on that. | ||
| I think we wouldn't have taken a divided country and made it more divided. | ||
| When we have a big balance sheet, we're asking for the inflation that came. | ||
| And as a final point, my own judgment is the story that I hear from many of my peers. | ||
| Well, the inflation, well, that's not really the central bank's fault. | ||
| That's because of Putin and the pandemic nonsense. | ||
| A change in prices happens in a market economy because of shocks in the world. | ||
| Changes in prices happen every day. | ||
| That's not what inflation is. | ||
| Inflation is when that change in prices become embedded. | ||
| It's second and third order effects. | ||
| And that's what's been the biggest harm to the country. | ||
| My recommendation is a smaller balance sheet, takes the Fed back to a more manageable size, a more serious job. | ||
| And interestingly, if you can have a smaller balance sheet, you can have lower interest rates. | ||
| Back to you. | ||
| How much smaller? | ||
| So when I joined, the Fed balance sheet was about $880 billion, included a bunch of foreign currencies. | ||
| We do need some balance sheet to do our underlying business, to help run the treasuries, to help be a good counterparty to the rest of the central banks in the world. | ||
| The economy has obviously grown since then. | ||
| I wouldn't want to put a precise number on it. | ||
| But right now, the Fed balance sheet is about $7 trillion. | ||
| They are participating in almost every banking market almost every day. | ||
| The world has come to rely on the central bank's massive imprimatur. | ||
| I would say it is trillions larger than it needs to be. | ||
| We can't make this change overnight. | ||
| But if markets knew that our objective was to get to a balance sheet that was as riskless as possible and as small as possible, and we would get there in due time and with a strategy, I think markets and market participants could well adjust to it. | ||
| The central bank could then be a powerful central bank, but a more limited one, and I would argue, wouldn't find its way in harm's way politically or economically. | ||
| I have to ask you this. | ||
| I will come to you because this is important too, for the work you're doing, but you brought up politically at the end. | ||
| How important is it that the Fed be independent in monetary policy? | ||
| You said operational independence, but does that mean, for example, that governors, including the chairman, should be free from the risk of being fired for other than cause? | ||
| See, Greg started out so softly. | ||
| We're talking about crypto. | ||
| And then you see the Fed beat reporter in him come out here at the end. | ||
| I believe in the operational independence in the conduct of monetary policy as a political economy matter. | ||
| I think the economy is better off. | ||
| If the world perceives, markets perceive, members of Congress perceive. | ||
| You've got central banks that are calling it the best they see it. | ||
| Being a central banker is not a prize for the perfect. | ||
| These are hard jobs, lots of uncertainty. | ||
| The data is a mess. | ||
| But the world's better off if they think they're doing their level best to call balls and strikes. | ||
| But the operational conduct of monetary policy doesn't mean that the Fed shouldn't be criticized. | ||
| Central bankers should not be pampered princes. | ||
| If Chairman Hill and his colleagues think that we're doing a terrible job at the central bank, they should be able to call it out. | ||
| Same thing with the president. | ||
| As a matter of fact, I'd rather the president call out his consternation with the central bank to the world than do what used to happen in generations past. | ||
| I don't mean to be invoking President Reagan again, but being summoned to the Oval Office for a little quiet to-do about what you're doing and right. | ||
| Central banks were created so that politicians would have someone to blame for this. | ||
| None of this is new. | ||
| I read breathlessly in the newspapers how mean these politicians are to the central bank. | ||
| Well, grow up, be tough. | ||
| And here's the most important thing. | ||
| What's the secret to central bank independence, hitting its objectives, doing its job? | ||
| Imagine we had had stable prices in the last five years like we did for most of the 30 years before it. | ||
| Well, there wouldn't really be much of a political fight to be had. | ||
| Doing its job and having stable prices is the Fed's plot armor. | ||
| It is how we can succeed and thrive. | ||
| I call it plot armor. | ||
| I learned this from Mark Andreessen, who's going to be our lunchtime guest. | ||
| He introduced the expression to me. | ||
| I'm a big James Bond fan. | ||
| I watch all the movies. | ||
| But James has plot armor. | ||
| We know they're never going to get them because we want to watch the next movie. | ||
| The Fed's plot arbor is being good at its job. | ||
| And so my own judgment is the failings in its job, not just in achieving stable prices, but wandering into things in which they have no business-like climate, suggests that the politics are happening somewhat closer to home. | ||
| After 9-11, the American people demanded a what went wrong after the 2008 financial crisis and all the harms that were done. | ||
| The American people, elected representatives, said, well, we've got to get to the bottom of this. | ||
| How did this happen? | ||
| Let's connect the dots. | ||
| Somehow, after the great inflation that served many of us well and did great harm to our fellow citizens, barely a peep. | ||
| What are the fundamental reasons why this happened? | ||
| Is it really because of Vladimir Putin and the pandemic? | ||
| Or is it something we could have controlled ourselves? | ||
| It was a very quiet group. | ||
| This group in the House of Representatives decide this deserves the same level of scrutiny. | ||
| I think it's essential. | ||
| I think it's important. | ||
| I think it's not been done. | ||
| And just to give another example, after the 08 crisis, the Dodd-Frank Act was put in place because we were going to make sure we'd have fundamental reform of our banking supervision and regulation. | ||
| That thing had been running for 15 years. | ||
| All of our bank regulators said, great news. | ||
| We've got a safe and sound banking system. | ||
| Until February of 2023, two relatively small banks, hardly ones that we thought were systemically significant, had a bit of a run. | ||
| The regulators thought everything was just swell until they weren't. | ||
| And we've never asked the question about, well, maybe all that Dodd-Frank legislation didn't work. | ||
| Maybe our banking system is not safer and sounder. | ||
| Maybe we've created less competition. | ||
| And I think we've got to get to the bottom of it. | ||
| The more honest we are about what we're doing right and wrong, the more we can fix it. | ||
| And if we don't fix these things, the 21st century will not be ours. | ||
| It will be some adversary of ours on the other side of the world. | ||
| With Treasury market dislocation and foreign repatriation of bonds and dollars, what are the risks for Fed and Treasury now to keep market integrity, especially with swap FX structures and trades? | ||
| I don't know if you saw Jamie Dimon speaking earlier today, but he talked a lot about his concerns about the ability of a market that transacts in the trillions of dollars a day to maintain its integrity. | ||
| So I'll put that question to you, but I might actually put it a bit more broader and just say what keeps you up at night? | ||
| What, you know, you've lived through a horrible one 15 years ago, and you know better than anybody that there's always something out there lurking. | ||
| What are the extant risks to our financial system that we need to worry more about? | ||
| So what keeps me up at night mostly are red eyes from here back to the East Coast. | ||
| Otherwise, I sleep pretty well. | ||
| I've been out of government 12 or 13 years now, so most of the scars from the global financial crisis have healed until guys like Greg bring them up again and guys like French threaten to drag me back into things. | ||
| So I'd say the biggest risks that the U.S. have Are risks that no one's talking about, almost by definition. | ||
| If financial markets and households or businesses are really focused on something, the amazing thing about the American spirit is in our own haphazard way we deal with it. | ||
| I would just note a couple things. | ||
| One is we need to keep our eye on the ball. | ||
| For all of the significant risks that the U.S. economy and the country is facing, I would rather have our cards than anyone else's in the world by far. | ||
| George Schultz, who was my mentor at Stanford a million years ago and served under President Reagan, I remember working with him on a little project about something, and he interrupted me. | ||
| He was a dear colleague of Mike Boskins, who was a friend and mentor and another Hoover fellow. | ||
| And what George would say is the broad conduct of government policy doesn't have to be perfect. | ||
| In fact, even in the heyday of the Reagan era, it never was. | ||
| Government policy just can't be too destructive. | ||
| And if we can achieve that, the U.S. economy will be in great shape. | ||
| The problem over the course of the last several years is government policy has been too destructive. | ||
| Too destructive to banks, too destructive to individual liberty in the post-COVID era, too destructive of technology and innovation. | ||
| If over the course of the next few years we can just try to arrest most of that destruction, what we used to describe in economics as the micro foundations of macroeconomics, this has nothing to do with the brilliant conduct of monetary policy or fiscal policy. | ||
| The micro foundations are what matter. | ||
| And what is that a fancy word for? | ||
| The culture of this country. | ||
| The willingness to work hard, take a risk, have it fail, and try again. | ||
| Everybody, no matter where you're from, there's no stigma associated with your station. | ||
| You try to make it, and other people don't say, well, you're too big for your britches. | ||
| This is not an American birthright, but it's why the U.S. economy has chronically outperformed from 1946 until this very day. | ||
| But if we do harm to those micro foundations, we decide we just want to try to hold on to what we've got. | ||
| We let some of the things that are most important, like stable prices, eat at the conscience and the integrity of an opportunity society, well, we're going to be no better off than a lot of these countries with whom we're trading with. | ||
| That's why this moment is such an important moment. | ||
| That's why getting policy right at this inflection point, like we haven't seen in 44 years, is huge. | ||
| And if we do that, the 21st century will be our century. | ||
| I'm not so worried about the other guys on the other side of the ocean. | ||
| They're not doing a lot to motivate their technology sector. | ||
| They are not freeing their people to create and innovate. | ||
| A lot of them want to come to the U.S. where they can do their best work. | ||
| If we can focus on what we do best and try to copy someone else's five-year plan, we're going to be just fine. | ||
| So while this might seem like a scary moment for a lot of us hanging around government in the private sector, this is the best opportunity we've had. | ||
| And I have a parochial American view. | ||
| If the U.S. does well and can get through this inflection point as well as President Reagan did 44 years ago, our allies are going to love us like never before, and our adversaries will be scared of us. | ||
| The essential thing is that we grow during this period. | ||
|
First Ladies Initiative Insights
00:04:11
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| And if we do, that'll take care of a lot of the problems that are subjecting us and causing us to think that this is a period of malaise. | ||
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Today, our coverage of the U.S. Conference of Mayors winds down with its closing plenary lunch, featuring a panel of mayors from the cities of Albuquerque, Bend, Oregon, Farmington Hills, Michigan, and Durham, North Carolina. | |
| Topics include affordability, immigration, and AI. | ||
| Watch live at 12.45 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at cspan.org. | ||
| Travel through the history of America's space program on American History TV all day on C-SPAN 2, featuring classic NASA films and historical newsreels from past space missions. | ||
| Watch Saturday, starting at 8 a.m. Eastern, as American History TV sits down with Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Apollo curator Tiesel Muir Harmony to explore Americans in space from the creation of NASA in 1958 through the early Gemini flights to Neil Armstrong's historic first steps on the moon in July 1969. | ||
| She also looks ahead to the upcoming Artemis missions with the goal of returning astronauts to the lunar surface. | ||
| Plus, relive the race to the moon, Skylab, and the Space Shuttle program. | ||
| And hear first-hand accounts from legendary NASA flight directors Gene Krantz and Gerald Griffin. | ||
| The crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you. | ||
| Watch the history of the American Space Program all day Saturday, starting at 8 a.m. Eastern on American History TV on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Welcome back to the program. | ||
| Joining us to talk about the role of political spouses in our nation is Anita McBride. | ||
| She is the director of the First Ladies Initiative at American University and former Chief of Staff to First Lady Laura Bush. | ||
| Anita, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thank you for having me, Mimi. | ||
| So first, tell us about the First Ladies Initiative at American University. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, sure. | |
| Delighted to tell you how we're very proud at American University is the only university in the country to actually have a center established to study the role of American First Ladies in their legacies, contributions to our politics, our policy, and to global diplomacy. | ||
| It was established in 2011. | ||
| We host a series of conferences around the country, mostly in partnership with National Archives, Presidential Libraries, White House Historical Association. | ||
| We have a lecture series that we do, classes that we've helped to develop on First Ladies. | ||
| And over the last couple of years, very thrilled that we were, along with two co-authors, I was able to publish the first ever textbook on U.S. First Ladies that we use now at American University, but also at other universities around the country. | ||
| And just to mention your co-author of two books, Remember the First Ladies, Legacies of America's History Making Women, and also U.S. First Ladies Making History and Leaving Legacies. | ||
| And why, Anita, is it important to understand the role of First Ladies anyway? | ||
| Well, I think we can't talk about inclusive history in our country if we don't include the role of these women and the contributions that they've made throughout the evolution of our country. | ||
| Even, you know, at the founding of our country and our founding mothers, even when these women did not have rights, they were not enshrined in our Constitution until well over 100 years after our country was founded. | ||
| But still, they found a way and an important way to ensure the survivability of our country and the ways that they're going to leave this to take you live to the House. | ||