When I heard the comments about 1940s I knew it was going to be a rather long introduction, but I appreciate it very much. Gary has done a lot for the University and he is a really dedicated person. We’ve had some conversations over the past several months, actually, about this day and especially about what we would discuss, and some things changed all that, so I’ll speak to you from some notes that I was still making at breakfast this morning.

I’d like to first of all speak about some distinguished people here—Ruben Nelson, and the sister of Senator Russell is here today, and I’m so happy to see her. I had a chance to talk to her last night. I don’t know—you may think you are the most interesting person in this place, but I really think of NAME, and I’m really glad to see her again here this morning. John Duffield, Professor Duffield, has been a partner really with Gary in this enterprise and I’ve known John since he was teaching at the University of Virginia, and I’d like to mention him as another fine person, and Steve Walkters is going to be taking the moderations of this exchange this morning, and I couldn’t think of a finer selection there. I’d like to thank President Adams for the introduction and the comments that you made because you did link together NATO and the things that have happened here. Ambassador Martin Hilldebrand is here, truly one of the truly finest ambassadors to Germany from the United States that we’ve ever had, and it’s an honor to be in the same room with you, Ambassador. We also have a group of students here, and that’s the most important part, and I’m really glad to see you’re lining the walls—I hope that doesn’t mean you’re looking for a way out. But it is sort of like church—I don’t see anybody in the front rows actually. All the rows in the front are empty. You’re more than welcome to come down, and I know very well that you won’t, and I wouldn’t either. Charles Campbell has done so much in support of this university. I am very glad to have the chance to have breakfast this morning with Mack Mattingly. Senator Mattingly and I worked very closely together at NATO in Belgium at the headquarters there.

I was planning to talk to you about NATO, and I was given about 15 or 20 minutes, so I’m going to move on. As I said, I was planning to talk about NATO; in fact, I thought about it all through the latter part of August and into September as Jenny and I traveled through Europe, mostly in Germany. We arrived from New York on that trip on Monday the 10th of September on our way to Atlanta, but anybody who was in New York on that Monday knows that there were a lot storms that kept moving through the city and its surroundings, and so our plane didn’t get out for Atlanta on Delta. We waited for another and then another, and we had been up for, I don’t know, a day and a half by then, so I said, "Why don’t we just go into Manhattan? We know some good hotels; we’ll stay there, have a relaxing evening." After all, we were on vacation. So we did. And I signed out of the Catano Hotel with Jenny on Park Avenue and 37th Street at 9 o’clock in the morning. And all was wonderful. The day was absolutely beautiful. And the redcap helped us because we had a lot of bags—12 days on the road. And he whistled down a cab that pulled over, and then he just stood there and said, "Look at that." And I looked down south on Park Ave, and the first tower was on fire, and I couldn’t believe it, but three stories of the tower were showing fire and were creating three black streaks across the building. And he said, "My dispatcher said an airplane hit it." And I thought, Private plane runs into the—and of course, I was 15 years old when the B25 Mitchell Bomber hit the Empire State Building and I remember that very very well, and I said to Jenny, "There’s going to be a big fire here." That building is so high, and that fire is so high up on it. This is going to take everything NY has got to get this out. We were checked out, standing in the street, so I said to the driver, "You think you can get to the airport?" And he said, "Well, I’ll try it." We went down through the Midtown Tunnel, and while we were in the tunnel, I said to Jenny, "Do you have your camera? I’d like to get a picture of that." We got out the other side, and I turned out and looked out the back window when we got up on the expressway on the other side of the east river to take a picture, and as I looked through the lense, it looked as if two buildings were on fire. And I said, "That can’t be; it must just be the shadow of the smoke just falling on the other bldg." Then the driver said, "I’m getting the word that another airplane hit the buildings down there, and that’s when it all started to come apart and I realized what had truly happened. We got home—I don’t mean to go into all that because whatever we went through then is absolutely miniscule, zero, to what others went through. We got home Saturday. I finally found a rental care that had an eighth of a tank of gas and a bag of potato chips, and I said, "I’ll take it."

Therefore, I want to change a little bit what I’m going to say. I have had a lot of experience that comes to my mind and has come to my mind since I looked down Park Avenue, and I’d like to talk about what wer’re going to now especially, but I need to put some background into that, so I’m going to talk about a congressional commission that I have been working on for the past more than three years. We published a report which we gave to the administators and to the Congress, and we made it public in march of 2001. That report you should read. That’s my message to you. It is unaware; it is written by the National Security Study Group, so the website is nssg.gov. It’s all there. It’s in three volumes. We put them out over three years. I want to talk about those a little bit. The people with whom I worked on that committee, are Newt Gingrich, Dandy Young—it was a very broad group of people—Warrne Rugman, Gary Hart?, John Dantzee, the White House Correspondent, Congressman Lee Hamilton, a number of others, Admiral Harry Trane, CEO Norm Augustine.

What we did was we made a bipartisan study which had three parts to it—what does the future look like as far as the security of the country is concerned for the first quarter of the new century, and then what would be a strategy to meet that vision of security, and then what would be the implementation of that, so I’m going to very briefly cover it, and that’s what I wanted to give you the website. We took about a year and talked to everybody for whom we had respect when it comes to the word intelligence, used in the sense of seeking out information. And when we finished that, this very disparate group of people came to a conclusion that we never thought we’d come to a year earlier when we started. And we argued with each other whether or not we wanted to publicly say what we thought. We decided that we had to say what we thought, and we did, and not only that, we put it first in the report to emphasize it.

We said—I hate to say these words actually—we said in this first part which we called New World Coming—that’s the first volume—Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers, and we were talking about the terrorist threat. We said that in several different ways, and we published it. The way we convinced ourselves to publish it was, what happens if we don’t publish it? What kind of a commission are we if we think this and we don’t publish it? We didn’t really know what people would say. We published that in the spring of 1999, and later on we published some other words. We said we felt that events could happen to us within the next few years that would be shocking to our own sensibilities. We then launched into work on what to do about it, and we created the second volume, which is a volume that has to do with the strategy, and I won’t try to go into detail on that except to say that it had to be a much broader strategy than we had, and perhaps the most important point was that we said, "We’ve looked all around, and we do not have the strategy. We do not have the strategy as a nation to protect ourselves, to respond, to prevent things from happening. And I have to say that today we do not have a strategy. We published the results for those studies in the spring of 2000. After that we published the final volume, which was the implementation recommendations.
, after that we published the final volume which was the implimention recommendations - "what should we asctually do?’ and the first thing we said beyond the question of strategy was that we need to create an agency with the head on the cabinet level report to the president and has control of enough of the assets of the United States to be able to respond to these kinds of events.

We made a lot of recommendations but the main one was the creation of that agency. And here’s why. If you look at our own United States today either as a member of another country and we have distinguished representations and ambassadors a number of ambassadors with us here today, you’ll see the strongest crisis management system is in the state department. The customs service is in the treasury department. The border patrol is in the department of justice. The coast guard is a part of the department of transportation. The cyberthreats against this country are covered under the responsibilities of the commerce. The natural infrastructure protection program is handled by the FBI and I could go on.

There is congressional oversight of intelligence but there is not congressional oversight isn the sence of a committee. And there are some people in this room who would fully understand how hard it would be to create another committee in the congress of US. There is no committee that covers homeland defense or homeland protection or response, We recommended that those things be done. We recommended that an agency be created and that an oversight committee be created.

When you think about disaster and response you also have to think about civil liberties and how they are protected. You do not want, if you can avoid it as all costs, to have marshal law in this country,. But we could have an event that would be big enough, bigger than what one governor could handle, bigger than what two governors can handle, and then how are we going to do this…how are we going to respond.

Of course our president is our leader and our president is in charge but who is in charge of the actual response? That’s the question that we asked. When the president saids we need to respond then who is in charge. Governor Tom Ridge of Penn. Has an office in the White House but that’s not an agency. Next, that a good first move, but he has to have clout. He has resposibilbility now, he has authority now now he needs re3sources. He needs structure. He nneds to abe able to respond. We kmade it clear that what we were recommending was not something that be would adding to the bureaucracy, something that would be costing us vastly more money, something that would be a replacement for the National Security Council, not like that. What we are talking about is a solution to the problem…Whose in charge. And how does that chain of responsibility, leadership, command go all the way down from the president to, lets say, downtown New York.

As you know there has been a response to this report but is a long way to go. I’d like to make some concluding comments about our own personal responsibilities because we all know in the face of what we’ve seen what we actually in our new world of technology we were actually able to be there and see it. And say "Oh, my good Lord. And see entire buildings fall. What does that mean to us? It means that we have to ask ourselves how do we find the unity, the international as well as national unity to respond to what we’ve seen happen. If we have a strategy how do we carry it out. We not only need the structure within the US, we need to pull the coast guard and the border patrol and all of those elements together to actually get out on the road and deal with those issues and work in preventing and responding to the things which we know will happen again. Not only that, but all of us need to ask ourselves these questions. Do we really think Islam is responsible for all this? I think we all know that it is not Islam. Do we think the Arabs can be responsible for all this? No, we are talking about a stretch of geography from North Africa to the Asian Pacific. And within that area we are talking about terrorists who do not expouse or who have moved away from the principles of the great religions of the world. This I think we have to not only except as a truth but to express it. As we move into this time, we have to recognize that we are in change.

Everyone talks about dealing with change but in this sense we really have to be respond to the world around us. We have to be aware of it. We have to take part ourselves in doing the best we can to protect ourselves. We have to keep up the information flow about what’s going on around us. And we have to have some recognitions. The recognition of the interdependence of the US and the rest of the world. We have a Declaration of Independence that we are proud of and rightfully so. But we are also interdependent. There is hardly any thing, any major question we have in the world today that the US can answer alone, or address alone whether it’s environment, whether it is issues of epidemiology, whether it is trade and definitely whether it is security so we can’t forget that we need the rest of the world and the way that we can get that understanding of interdependece is to have structure like NATO.

NATO is the finest example that we can possibly have of a regional structure that can truly respond as we’ve seen to almost any kind of emergency in the world of security., NATO developed from something that was first called the Western Union. It sounds like a telegraph office. It was a little small organization that was called the
European Western Union. That shifted over into what is NATO today. Incidently, if you go back to the late 1940s, you will see what the US congress was talking about in terms of the Marshall Plan and NATO which we all mention often. The words the United States of Europe come up in the congressional testimonies and publications of that time even more than the words "North Atlantic Treaty Organization" or any other,. Now we see a united Europe and NATO has been a part of that. There are regional structures all over the world-in Africa , Asian and Latin America but there are not strong and they don’t serve the real purpose wehich they should in that they are the implementers under the United Nations. And we can’t say we don’t want to pay our dues to the United Nations. We think the United Nations make a lot of mistakes and doesn’t do what we would like it to do etc.
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Sometimes NATO doesn’t look good from day to day but NATO from decade to decade is great. We’re lucky to have it, we’re lucky to have it now.

I am going to conclude. I don’t think it’s too dramatic to say today that when we saw happen in New York it was the death of incidence. It was the rise, I think, of a togetherness and an understanding but the death of innocence. I think we have a stronger understanding today then we had a month ago, of who we are, what’s the world about, what do we have to do now. A stronger understanding, a stronger togetherness.

We Americans are citizens of the world. We’ll never be the same. But we can be even better at being Americans than we were. For those who are here from central Europe and other places, we all can be better citizens of this planet.



John R. Galvin served as NATO’s top military commander in Europe during the five years that ended the Cold War. More recently, he was temporarily an envoy of the U.S. State Department with the rank of Ambassador in assisting with negotiations in Bosnia.

A graduate of West Point, Galvin holds a master’s degree in English from Columbia University, and continued his military education at the Army Command and General Staff College and the Army War College. He also did postgraduate study at the University of Pennsylvania and attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy on a fellowship in 1972-73. He spent most of his early career in parachute and light infantry units, with command at all levels.

Galvin served two years in the Vietnam War as a staff officer in plans and operations as a commander of First Battalion, Eighth Cavalry. He also served 15 years in Europe and 5 years in Latin America. In June 1987, he was appointed Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (NATO), and the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Army, Naval, and Air Forces in Europe.

He is board member of the Institute for Defense Analysis, the National Defense University, the Atlantic Council of the United States, J.&W. Seligman &Co., Raytheon Company, former director of USLife, and chairman emeritus of the American Council on Germany.

Galvin’s published books include The Minute Men, a study of the first battle of the American Revolution; Air Assault, an analysis of the development of air mobility in twentieth century warfare; and Three Men of Boston, a study of the political events leading to the American Revolution.


The U.S. Commission on National Security Report
Coverage of the report in the Washington Post
Coverage of the Russell Symposium in the Athens Banner-Herald