J. Fife Symington III, a great-grandson of steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, graduated from Harvard University in 1968. He served in the U.S. Air Force during the Viet Nam War and was stationed at Luke Air Force Base, west of Phoenix, Arizona.  After his service he remained in Arizona, where he married Ann Olin Pritzlaff, became involved in real estate, and founded the Symington Company in 1976. 

In 1990, after working for years at the grassroots of the Republican Party, he ran for governor.  Fighting off four challengers in the Republican primary and a highly contested runoff against Terry Goddard in the general election, Symington was elected in the special election of 1991 with 52% of the vote. He won re-election handily in 1994 as Arizonans affirmed his fiscal conservatism and views on limited government. In 1997 he was forced to resign from office.  Recently, in 2005 he expressed in interest in reentering the political arena, but reconsidered and remains a partner in the Symington Group, a venture capital and political/business consulting firm.    

J. Fife Symington III:
Thanks, Jack. Thank you very much.  Jack, thank you for that mercifully short introduction. And of course the most important thing you said was that Mary Dell is my mother-in-law.

J. Fife Symington III:
I’m really pleased to be here today.  Judy, thank you for the invite.  The work of the Historical Foundation and the Goldwater Lecture Series is just a great program and I was trying to think about how to say some meaningful words and I’ve never in my entire career, had the opportunity to talk about Barry Goldwater and my relationship and how it really started when I was 12 years old.  How this whole political life that I got involved in started.  So I thought I’d have some fun and launch.  And it’s been a long time since I‘ve been under the bright lights so I’m gonna, I’m trying to adjust. 

J. Fife Symington III:
So I’ve been looking forward to this day and I’m really delighted to be here to talk about Barry Goldwater, what he believed in and how it influenced my life.  He’s a big and consequential figure. He’s a very hard man, in many ways, to capture in words.  There’s really, to my mind, never been anybody quite like him in American politics, especially when you review the political landscape today.  But trying to give the man his due is a worthy assignment. And it’s a fun one and, of course, the one thing we all remember about Barry is that he was a heck of a lot of fun. 

J. Fife Symington III:
In one way or another, I’ve been drawn and connected to Barry from the early years of my life.  Maryland, where I grew up, may be a long way from Arizona, and by the way, most Marylanders, when I first moved out here didn’t even know where Arizona was.  But Goldwater always carried with him something of this state wherever he went.  Wherever he went in the world, but it was in Maryland when I was 12 or so that I got my first glimpse of him. 

J. Fife Symington III:
One morning in 1958, there he was rolling up our steep driveway of our farm which was about 30 miles outside of Baltimore in the winter.  He’d come to stay for the weekend and his ride was not the black sedan that a young boy would have expected from a United States Senator.  No, he climbed out of a Corvette Stingray.  He was wearing cowboy boots and he had a cowboy hat on and to an Eastern boy like me, it looked like Marshall Dillon stepping right out of Gunsmoke.

J. Fife Symington III:
I was locked onto Barry from that point on.  Goldwater the political figure is recalled for his bluntness and occasionally his stern manner.  His critics tried to paint him as angry and uncaring.  But I knew him always as a gentleman and even then, back in Baltimore in 1958, he repeatedly paid attention to me, a young tow-headed child who followed him around that entire weekend. 

J. Fife Symington III:
My father was running for Congress at the time.  Dad ran three times in the second congressional district and in a district where the registration was 4 to 1 against us.  Needless to say, he lost three times.  Now, I wondered sometimes why my Dad never looked for a different district.  Well, later on, I made sure that I did.

J. Fife Symington III:
So Barry had come to stay with us and confer with Dad on his uphill and campaign and to give a speech on defense at what was called the Talson Armory.  And by the way Judy, I still have the open reel tape of that Goldwater speech on the Soviet Union which I’d like to give to the Foundation.  And it was absolutely mesmerizing.  ‘Cause I’d never heard anything like it before. 

J. Fife Symington III:
But the conversations that weekend I was allowed to overhear and they had to do with the subject of the Cold War and the Soviet threat, those were the days when we were all in school and we were taught to get under our desks because if the Soviet bombers came in and planted their cherries on us. They were thinking that being under the desk at school would help a lot. What I noticed was the clarity and conviction that the Senator conveyed about containing the Soviet Union and turning it back. 

J. Fife Symington III:
He and my father spoke of nuclear deterrence and hot spots and Communist treachery.  The recurring themes were resolve, determination and unyielding strength in the face of a spreading tyranny.  Sound familiar?  Well, Ronald Reagan is remembered now for having won the Cold War by pursuing peace through strength.  But the leading exponent of that creed for 18 long years before another westerner would ride into town, was Barry Goldwater.  Then, as ever, there were those who were inclined to hide from the danger and hope for the best and those inclined to confront it.  Barry Goldwater carried the message for the latter and bore the contempt of the former amplified by the eastern media and he did it unreservedly for more than three decades, excuse me, decades.  That’s an old eastern phrase, I think I’ve…

J. Fife Symington III:
I suppose I will never know just how much Barry Goldwater had to do with my own journey to Arizona, but he embodied this state and he captured my imagination that weekend.  I would correspond with him during high school and college.  Each letter he sent always surprised me and I still have all those letters and I’m also going to give those to the Foundation.  One, in particular, is a lengthy dissertation, it’s about a 10 page letter on the Vietnam War at its height, which is, it’s a fascinating letter.  Well, throughout my life, he would continue to cross my mind and my path.  His influence on my thinking was great.  But even more than that, some nine years after his death, his influence is abundantly clear in the charm, the character and the expanding prosperity of Arizona.  When the day came, I left the family farm and made a huge mistake and went off to Harvard to college.

J. Fife Symington III:
Now that was 1964, a rather important year for Barry Goldwater.  Two memories from the time have remained with me.  I was not the typical Harvard undergraduate of the day.  I was a southern Marylander.  We thought of ourselves as southerners even though we were a border state, but I might add that Lincoln locked up all my ancestors in jail during the Civil War because they were all working for the Confederacy.  But I joined the ROTC after arriving on campus and found there was not a long line of resolute youth competing for that privilege. 

J. Fife Symington III:
So today the fashion is for all to claim support for the troops.  But back then, the virulent strain of pacifism gripping Harvard and most other campuses had the ROTC members concealing their uniforms in paper bags.  Late in the ’64 campaign cycle, I came into a Goldwater for President button, a great big button and occasionally I had the audacity to wear it beyond my dorm room.  I was once accosted in the airport, at Logan Airport, by a middle-aged Bostonian who apparently took great offense at the pin.  “What’s the matter with you son?”  He fumed.  “Are you mentally demented?” 

J. Fife Symington III:
Well, earlier that same year, Barry found me again, this time in the wilds of Quebec.  Before starting college that fall, I spent -- I took a memorable journey by canoe for two months on the Rupert River from Central Quebec to Rupert’s House on Hudson’s Bay with 10 rugged men making over a thousand mile journey through very tough and harrowing terrain.  Seven weeks into the trip, we ran out of food because we were lousy fishermen.  And we were tired and famished and pulled into this camp after about 30 miles of paddling one day.  The bugs were eating us alive and a pre-arranged amphibious aircraft flew overhead and dropped our provisions for our final week running the Rupert right into the bay.  As we opened the parcels, I noticed that they were all wrapped in newspaper and this was in August of 1964, and my attention shifted from the food to the big headline from San Francisco, “Goldwater Wins Nomination.”  So, that is how I learned that Barry Goldwater would be taking on LBJ in 1964 and he was about to take a pretty tough and harrowing trip of his own.   

J. Fife Symington III:
Well, Barry won only six states in that campaign and well less than 40% of the vote.  By any standard, it was a sound defeat and Barry took it with grace, but the judgment of a moment and the verdict of time and history are two very different things.  As a historical figure, LBJ peaked on that November day and he’s been falling ever since.  On both great issues of that contest, the power and limits of government and the conduct of foreign affairs, Barry was right and Lyndon had it all wrong.  Johnson soon found himself shrinking beneath the weight of a badly conducted war and a badly conceived Great Society program.  Barry went home to Arizona, stuck to his principles, and kept taking magnificent photographs.  Johnson would see his party unravel and the political power he coveted torn from his hands.  Awaiting him was not a victor’s laurel, but the harsh judgment of historians.  And even now, after four decades, biographer Robert Carol labors over a fourth volume cataloging the tragic flaws and the venal exploits of Goldwater’s victorious opponent.  Barry was a less complicated man in my view, which contributed perhaps to his defeat in that campaign.  But it also contributed to his success in life.  We esteem him now as soldiers like to say, because he led from the front.  There was no dark side to Barry Goldwater, no hidden man, no calculation, no pretense.  In a profession full of show horses and coifed camera hounds, Barry was the outlier, the one who never seemed to feel that familiar call to conspicuous virtue. 

J. Fife Symington III:
Four years after that 1964 campaign, Barry would cross my path once more in yet again in a most unusual way.  After college, I joined the Air Force and I found myself assigned to Luke Air Force Base west of Phoenix. I’ve always suspected that Barry’s influence with the Air Force might have had something to do with that assignment.  The Vietnam War was still young and I soon found myself in Thailand serving as a weapons controller and search and air rescue officer over Laos.  Barry was never a supporter of the half measures and the shifting political calculations that drove America’s war policy in Vietnam.  Occasionally, he got himself into trouble for a rash remark about the subject, but once again, time would prove him right. 

J. Fife Symington III:
I’d only been stationed at Luke for about four months, but that was all it took. Just like its leading citizen years before, Arizona had captured my imagination.  And I became a westerner at heart and I knew after returning from the war that this was going to be home.  And my experiences at Luke keep coming back to me because I met the I think it’s the Jenkin’s who are here from Colorado who turned out to be great friends of my commanding officer when I was at Luke, who took me up in my first T33 jet ride and we went up over the Grand Canyon and he inverted the T33 and did barrel rolls as we were flying across the Grand Canyon.  That was great until I got sick to my stomach. But Colonel Jim Lannon was a great friend and it was nice to meet his friends from Colorado this morning.  Well, what I did not know what that one day, I would be drawn to political life myself.  But I was and as most are aware, I would hope, that led to a rather eventful 10 years. 

J. Fife Symington III:
Most of that is the subject for another speech.  But Barry was a recurring presence when I was Governor too.  In executive politics, especially in this state, you’ve never around for long, and when I was Governor, we tried to get a lot of things done while we had the chance.  And we got in the habit along the way, when we had something big to roll out, of running it by Barry in advance.  He was a great barometer, incredible barometer.  And he still had tremendous instincts even in his later years.  On three or four occasions, I made the trip up Hogan Drive to Barry’s house.  He still had that same way of looking at you that I first experienced in Maryland. Only now it came from a seated position, cane at the ready, he was wearing shorts, here I am in a tie.  He wouldn’t like that.  And alongside his desk off the front room.  He would listen intently, never moving his eyes from yours and when you were finished, he would ask, at the most, one or two questions.  He’d get right to the heart of the matter, then he’d say, hopefully, “Makes a lot of sense to me.”  And he would say that, you knew that you had him behind you and behind you he would stay.  He would never waver. 

J. Fife Symington III:
I’ve always been an adherent to supply side economics, believing that if you reduced the tax burden on productive economic output, you would get more of it.  But the tax reduction policies that we put in place in this state which even now contribute to its increasing wealth and opportunity, were also a simple expression of Goldwater’s.  A government big enough to give you everything you want, Barry famously said, is also big enough to take away everything you have.  Every time we reduced taxes, and we did so every year that I was in office, we were honoring Goldwater’s maxim.  At this point, it can’t be known whether Barry’s warnings about the dangers of oversized government will ever be heeded.  Washington continues its cycle of tax, spend and elect and continues to draw power to itself, that the Constitution left with the states.  At the same time, Washington is failing to carry the critical responsibility it does have to secure our borders.  Now if Barry were around today, I think he would have something to say about these subjects.  And I think we pretty much know what they would be.  It’s also worth considering what America’s leading Cold War warrior might have to say about this new war that we’re fighting now.  Excuse me one second.

J. Fife Symington III:
In the 21st Century, Islamic terror has become every bit the threat to freedom that Nazism and Imperial Communism were in the 20th Century.  There is reason to question, however, whether the American people yet truly understand this threat and yet know quite how – and do not quite know how to respond to it.  One thing is certain, I don’t think anyone in public office today is speaking with quite the same clarity and force that we would hear from Goldwater.  I believe that if Barry were alive and in office today, he would be speaking bluntly about the bloody origins and history of radical Islam and calling for the strongest possible measures to drive it out of the free world and to put it on the defensive everywhere else.  Much of the Islamic world’s response to murder as a high expression of faith has been indifference or faint disapproval if not implied or outright support.  This response has been more shocking than terror itself.  The dramatic cruelty of 9/11 was surely a new level of assault on America and the freedom for which it stands.  But the killers we have had with us for a long time.  New today is the framing of a stark and critical question regarding the real nature of Islam and the Islamic world’s failure, so far, to answer that question conclusively.  We know in the Western world, in the Judeo-Christian tradition that if you begin by severing faith from reason, you end up severing heads from shoulders.  Islam seems to be having difficulty asserting the same premise with any perceptible voice, let alone any effect.  It is true that the Islamic faith lacks a fixed hierarchical seat and structure, giving some difficulty to the task of annunciating a round and meaningful rejection of terrorist acts. 

J. Fife Symington III:
And yet the terrorists seem to be doing well enough organizing themselves, so it ought to be equally possible for those Muslims intent on distancing and reclaiming their faith from ruthless killers to do so.  Of course, the fear of those killers has much to do with the muted response, not only from peaceful Muslims, but from the leaders of many once great nations around the world.  I think that Barry would tell those folks in his plain spoken way, that the killers have to be stopped.  Because sooner or later, they will come for you.  The Soviets ruled by terror too as did the Nazis, as did other tyrannical regimes throughout history.  Now, I don’t think we would hear Barry muse out loud about lobbing one into the men’s room somewhere in Mecca.  I’m sure he learned his lesson about that formulation.  But he wouldn’t be leaving any room for misunderstanding among the American people about what they’re facing, either. 

J. Fife Symington III:
When we remember a consequential man like Barry, it’s easy to lionize him and to praise his works to the extent of obscuring his flaws.  I don’t mean to do that here.  Barry certainly had his shortcomings and he made his share of mistakes.  He could, in fact, be heard admitting while still in office that he’d gotten himself in a lot of trouble speaking sometimes without really thinking.  But there were times when the conservative cause really needed him and his strong voice and America needed him and his strong voice.  But this man was, as a former President said, upon his death, an American original.  He has certainly been the seminal political figure in this young state and those of us who had the pleasure of knowing him will never forget his singular personality.  And I will never forget the great influence that he’s had on my life.  He was as he seemed.  Determined, decisive, positive and bold and he helped to build an Arizona whose future grows brighter than even he may have ever imagined.  In this state, water is good as gold.  And so was Barry Goldwater.  Thank you very much.

J. Fife Symington III: Well that wasn’t so bad for a political speech.  It only took 20 -- it only took 15 or 20 minutes.  I’d be happy, I think I’m allowed to ask for questions.  Yes?

Audience Member:
Fife.

J. Fife Symington III:
Yes?

Audience Member:
Statement then a question.  Statement – Many of us believe, and I among them, that you’re the best Governor Arizona ever had.  Thank you. 

J. Fife Symington III:
Thank you. 

Audience Member:
For the question, about the political aspects of the Scott Libby trial, many people have believed that politically, the motives were political, what is your take? 

J. Fife Symington III:
If I were President of the United States, this morning I would have picked up the phone, I would have called Dick Cheney, I would have said, “Let’s grab the limo, let’s go to Libby’s house, let’s get Libby and his wife, let’s go see them.  Put our arms around him on the steps, let’s have a press conference.  I’ll announce that I’ve issued a full pardon.  It’s time to end this prosecutorial state nonsense going on in America.”  That’s what I would have done.  Just right up the gut.  Right away, no questions asked.  Here’s a guy who has served his country with great honor.  He’s been defending our national security.  A tremendous, tremendous record being picked apart by a prosecutor for an absolutely absurd reason, in my view, and it’s just another manifestation of the overreaching nature of the prosecutorial state that we’ve created.  And the President, I think, should deal decisively with it and run it right up the gut and get in everybody’s face about it.  That’s what I think.  Yeah.  Hope that wasn’t too strong for you. It’s always a danger to ask me what I think Tracy.  Yeah? 

Audience Member:
Tell us about yourself today.  What you’re doing, what your aspirations are.

J. Fife Symington III:
Well, I have a sort of a full blown cooking school up on Shea Blvd. called the Arizona Culinary Institute and we teach the classic French method and graduate about 200 students a year and we’re in our sixth year now.  It’s going really well.  It’s great fun.  As I commented to a friend, it’s a lot nicer than being in the restaurant business because it’s tuition driven. 

J. Fife Symington III:
You know the old saying about the restaurant business.  The restaurant owns you, you don’t own the restaurant. And then I have a the Symington Group and we do political and strategic business consulting. Particularly when corporations, you know, get in trouble and the media wave hits and they sort of deer in the headlights, they don’t know what to do.  Well, I’ve had a little bit of experience to the controversy and so we kind of help in that area.  And we also do venture capital, ground floor venture capital activities.  And so I’m really actually pretty busy.  I keep my hands in politically -- quietly.  I try not to surface too far, get the profile up where somebody can shoot at me.  But I love Arizona and I care very much about where it goes and its political future.  Yes?

Audience Member:
Is there anyone in Arizona or even in the present Congress who can measure up to Goldwater standards?  In your opinion?

J. Fife Symington III:
Boy, that’s really tough.  I, you know, there isn’t -- and I don’t mean I’m not being negative about any of our great public servants.  But, I just don’t see anybody on the national scene who has the, you know, the purity of conviction of Barry Goldwater, through his life and he held onto those convictions when the whole world was against him, or it seemed that way because if you remember back in his days in the 50’s and 60’s the national media was totally closely controlled out of New York by the three major media – and they used to ha – I mean, it was unbelievable the way they would hammer him.  But, you know, he just stuck to his convictions with such firmness and rectitude and in the end, of course, he was right and a tremendous consistency over the years and I don’t see anybody on the national political scene who has that you know, that type of background or consistency.  The last person was, of course, Ronald Reagan.  I thought Reagan was extremely consistent and whatever mistakes he made I think he just probably got some bad advice, especially in his second term.  Yeah.  Yes?

Audience Member:
Comment on where you think we’re going in the competition between the politicians and the press for the control of the national agenda and do you see any – is this battle going to go on forever? 

J. Fife Symington III:
Yep. Okay. Yeah, the battle will go on forever.  But the nice thing about it is, you don’t elect the press. Every you know, every two years and every four years, we have elections and the people, the voice of the people eventually comes through and I’ve got great faith in the will of the people.  I mean, I ran – what did I in my first election, I actually ran two general elections, because I had the runoff with Goddard.  But the first, you know, the first round, you reach this -- you realize that it’s the will of the people.  There’s a nobility in it.  Eventually the people will assert their voice and hopefully they’ll make the right decision.  And so, I think, you know, the press has a lot of fun in between the elections, but in the end of the day when the people vote they -- that’s the trump card in my view.  So…yes?

Audience Member:
Any advice for the current Governor or future Governors? 

J. Fife Symington III:
With regard to what subject? 

Audience Member:
Your choice.

J. Fife Symington III:
Well, I think to be a good Governor, you really need to have a very strong philosophical compass.  And really stick to your guns whether they’re pouring boiling water on you or not.  Not worry about your re-elect.  Just go do what’s right ‘cause eventually if you’ve done what you promised that you were gonna do and what you did was right, the people will respond and a good case in point would be my re-election in ’94 when I was 25 points behind Eddie Basha and he and I laugh about this, we’re friends.  At least I think we are!

J. Fife Symington III:
I was 25 points behind and we ran a poll and it was September and in fact Eddie had his staff asking my staff for all their resumes because he was already being called Governor at his campaign headquarters.  And so, I heard that and I sort of smiled and I thought well, maybe I got a shot here.  But where was I?  I got so focused on Eddie here, I forgot what I was gonna say.  The advice, yeah, in ’94 it turned out when I found out I was that far behind, we ran a poll and put it out in the field and do you realize that most Arizonans, voting Arizonans, had no idea that I’d lowered taxes?  They all thought that I’d raised taxes.  It was right there in the poll.  And I sort of thought, I just couldn’t believe this.  So we saw our opening and it was kind of like, promises kept.  Promises made, promises kept and we flipped the race.  Well, the lesson there is, I think that if you just go in with a really good program that’s philosophically based and you stick to your guns and you do what you say you’re gonna do, that’ll be good for the state and the re-election will take care of itself.  Yes? 

Audience Member:
As we all know, we’re the fastest growing state now.  How in the world are we going to be able to maintain the quality of life that brought us here, the beauty of the state and what we value so much?  This is almost an impossible challenge.  How do we handle this as we move forward? 

J. Fife Symington III:
Well, you know, I’m a pilot and I fly over the Mohave Desert all the time.  There’s a lot of empty desert out there so I don’t know whether that’s good news or bad news.  But the growth is gonna continue so you have to put into place really great policies to allow quality growth to happen and good planning on the ground you know, good air pollution rules and a freeway system, that meets the needs of the greater community.  And of course, very strict law enforcement because I’ve noticed that the crime statistic I can – you remember Marion Barry, the Mayor of Washington, D.C.?  Do you remember his classic statement?  They were asking him, somebody on the national news said, well, how’s the crime rate in Washington, D.C.?  And he says, oh well, except for the killings, we’ve got the lowest crime rate in the country.

J. Fife Symington III:
But especially with a way of illegal immigration, everything the first duty is to public safety, to protect the public in all its aspects and very strict law enforcement.  But the fact of the matter is, the Valley’s going to continue to grow and I -- so if, to you, population growth and more cars on the road is a loss of quality of life, then there’s going to be a loss of quality of life.  But I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that.  I think that there are ways to manage it and to stick with it to make sure that there’s really good forward planning for the anticipated growth.  Len? 

Audience Member:
What do you predict will be the Democrat candidate for President?

J. Fife Symington III:
Hillary Clinton. 

Audience Member:
 Do you?

J. Fife Symington III:
Yeah, and there’ll be a huge media wave to elect the first woman President of the United States.  She’s a very formidable candidate.  She’s really been vetted now politically in New York State and anybody that runs for office and gets elected in New York State has really been roughed up, knows what it’s like with the New York press, so she is battle ready and she won 25% of the Republican vote in her last election in New York State.  So she, I read all this sort of stuff, of course, I know the former President and the First Lady.  I’d never voted for them, but we’re friends over the years.  And I don’t agree with them on anything.  But they’re a very formidable political couple and I just think that they’ve got the juggernaut so, it’s going to take a really strong Republican candidate to beat her.  And -- but she’ll be the candidate.  Jeff?

Audience Member:
In follow up to Len’s question, here in Arizona, who do you foresee emerging any new stars in the Republican party for the Governor’s slot, next time around or the U.S. Senate? 

J. Fife Symington III:
Well, you know, we were – I was having a discussion with some of my political soul mates the other day and we were all sort of scratching our head trying to figure out who was going to emerge as a gubernatorial candidate and I really don’t know.  I thin that one of the great inhibitions to bringing in a really strong candidate is the Clean Election regime that we are operating under.  It’s a terrible -- I’ve always opposed it.  It’s a terrible system and it’s like wage and price controls in the free market.  It just -- it stren – the…I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in every campaign, it ends up being, the headline is, so and so candidate violated the campaign finance law because they didn’t put this form in or they – well, you know, the campaign ought to be about bigger issues than whether you put down on your ledger a $50.00 donation or not.  And there are enough land mines out there for people running for public office anyway to create this huge minefield of campaign finance law that hardly anybody can understand, I think is really wrong.  But I don’t have a name for you and with regard to the Senate, if one of those seats opens up, I think everybody’s going to run for it.  It’s going to be a free for all.  Everybody.

Audience Member:
Would you run?

J. Fife Symington III:
Oh, I don’t know.  I don’t know.  That’s really an interesting question.  I’ve got to be very careful what I say about that.  That might get back to my mother-in-law. In fact, I know it would get right back to my mother-in-law…Who did I miss here?  I’m enjoying this.  This is…I haven’t done this in a couple of years.  This is a lot of fun.  Yeah?

Audience Member:
What are your thoughts about a Republican nominee for the Presidency? 

J. Fife Symington III:
Well, I’m backing John McCain.  I’ve known him for 30 years. I forgive him for the campaign finance law stuff.  We don’t agree on everything, but you know,  literally two days after I was -- I left office, I get a call from none other than John McCain.  He says, let’s have lunch.  Where do you want to have lunch?  I said, I don’t know, I’d love to have lunch with you.  He says, okay, I’m gonna call, we’re gonna get a table at the Ritz and we’re gonna sit right in the middle of the dining room together.  Okay?  He did not run away from me. He, John has a type of a fierce integrity which he showed when he was a prisoner of war.  Just tremendous strength of character and I’m really worried about the turbulent world out there.  That’s why I talked a little bit about Islam which is the great challenge of our generation and future generations around the world.  And I’m comfortable with the idea of him in charge of American foreign policy and protecting the peace and protecting us. ‘Cause he’s experienced a wide range of life experiences with regard to that type of activity. That being said, I think we’ve got some really great potential in the Republican party.  I mean, Guiliani is proven his metal.  Mitt Romney is a fascinating. Imagine somebody as a conservative Mormon getting elected Governor of Massachusetts.  I mean, I went to college there for four years.  I still can’t figure that out.

J. Fife Symington III:
So there must be something magical there. So I’m, you know, I’m hopeful that we’re gonna have a really vigorous primary and it’s a Darwinian process and the person who comes out on top, I really believe will be the right person to lead the effort.  Speaking as a Republican, I’m sure there are Democrats in the audience.  Pardon me for my partisanship.  It was purely by mistake I wore my Republican elephant tie. Yes? 

Audience Member:
How do you see economic development in the State today and what do you think we need to promote it? 

J. Fife Symington III:
I’ve never been a fan of industrial policy.  To me that’s sort of a Eastern European, sort of socialist approach to economic thinking and so I’m not sure that, other than making sure we have the best tourism effort underway in the union, that and having a Governor who’s committed to, if Charles Schwab is thinking about moving their headquarters here, you get on a plane and you go talk to them and you really, you know, a little shuttle diplomacy to promote the state that, beyond that I’m not sure you really need to do anything other than keep your tax environment low so that you’re very competitive with regard to adjacent states and to cultivate investment capital and risk capital at its foundation with low tax rates.  That’s kind of where I’ve always believed it would happen.  But we really have a tremendous economic engine at work now in this state. And it’s just gonna continue to feed on itself and grow. 

J. Fife Symington III:
I’m what’s happening here is really incredible.  And I’m glad California is raising taxes and doing all kinds of silly things.  It’s great for Arizona.  You know?  We’re one tenth of their size, we’re one tenth their budget, one tenth their population, hopefully nine tenths as smart, I mean smarter than they are and it helps us because a lot of companies are leaving California to come to Arizona because of the differential in the cost of operating a business.  25%.  If you have a company in California and you want to move it here, on a piece of paper it’s 25% less expensive across the board to operate here.  And that’s great.  I think so.  Yes? 

Audience Member:
What would Goldwater do [inaudible] the Religious Right [inaudible]?

J. Fife Symington III:
Gosh!  I, you know, I really don’t know but the line that I used about severing reason from faith, I really think that that’s Goldwater.  You know?  I think he looked at the world you know, pragmatically and would want to make sure that faith and reason, you know, work together and that we didn’t get too off the charts, you know, with any policy but I really, I never really talked to him too much about that you know, about that subject over the years.  Judy could probably answer that better than I do.  Judy, do you want to be put on the spot and answer a question?  Yes?

Audience Member:
Could you comment on the situation with illegal immigration?

J. Fife Symington III:
Well, when I was in office, I was back in Washington all the time complaining about it.  We had a -- we figured we had a million, 200,000 illegals crossing the border every year and were -- we figure we were apprehending 3 to 400,000.  It was devastating the southern counties.  Bankrupting the judicial system, still is there.  The hospital systems, every – I mean, it’s just unbelievable what’s going on.  And when Clinton was President we, you may remember, I mean, I used to pound away and get in hot water for it, but I still believe it that it’s a fundamental responsibility of the United States government to protect our borders from invasion.  Whether it’s a friendly or unfriendly invasion, that’s an invasion.  When you talk about a million, 200,000 people a year.  So, I’m for very strict enforcement of the border.  I always have been.  And I think that anybody that’s here in this country illegally that’s past a, you know, that’s fresh, that’s been here 1 or 2 years illegally or something like that, or longer,  I you know, I just think you gotta play, most of them have got to -- everybody should play by the rules.  But we need to secure the border first.  That needs to be done.  It should have been done years ago.  They should have, they should have – everybody says, oh, we shouldn’t militarize the border, well, I mean, huh?  I don’t get that.  If you have that big a problem, you need to stop it.  The only – and so for a short period of time, maybe you have to have a real show of force and stop it.  But it’s really one of the signal failures of American domestic policy in the last 20 years.  It’s just shocking.  Yes?

Audience Member:
[Inaudible] and other such foolishness, when I moved here 20 years ago, I was a great admirer of initiatives and referendums, the longer I’m here and [inaudible] legislature that tie them up with so many rules they can’t overturn, do you have any idea why we should have that morass?

J. Fife Symington III:
Well, the initiative and referendum process, of course, the initiative is where the citizens get together and sign petitions.  The referendum is where the Legislature decides to put it on the ballot and not vote on it themselves because they, maybe they don’t have the courage to. I, again, you know, when you look at California, the Governor of California, Pete Wilson’s a friend, the former governor, he controls -- he controlled 40% of his budget.  All the rest of it was mandated spending driven by initiatives that had been passed in California. You either have a representative form of government or you don’t.  You elect people to make those decisions for you.  You have a Governor who’s there to hopefully, balance the excess the of the legislative activities that go on and the controlling of the budget’s the most important thing and so I have deep concerns, like you, about the initiative process because we tend to pass some very bad laws by initiative.  And I think the campaign finance thing, which just barely squeaked through is a perfect example of a real problem that we’ve created for ourselves. I’m hopeful it will be repealed or drastically changed and then we’ll be back to a more free form political environment, which I’m all for.  It’s you know, it’s just we need that.  Have I…

Audience Member:
Yeah, I heard one time a story that somehow as youths, you had save President Clinton’s life or something like that? 

J. Fife Symington III:
Oh, I was hoping that wouldn’t come up.

Audience Member:
Is that true?  What is that story?

J. Fife Symington III:
Yeah, well, it’s true. We were in Hyannisport on the beach a friend of mine and Clinton and two of my first cousins.  And the red flags were up on the beach because there was a rip tide and none of us would have probably survived the Arizona State Patrol’s blood alcohol level test. So, Tommy and I and Elise and Jane were walking down the beach and Tommy, this friend of mine from Baltimore who’s a very close friend of Clinton’s and a mutual best friend, turned to me and says, “Where’s Bill?”  And I looked around and I said, “I don’t know where he is.”  You know, he’s here, kind of, we looked out and we saw his head bobbing in the water about 200 yards off shore and he was in the rip tide.  And so I sprinted down the beach and there just happened to be a little rowboat there with the oars in the oar locks, nobody else around and I went out and about 400 yards off shore, I intercepted him in the rip tide and he’d been lacerated on his chest, taken by the rip tide over the rocks and he was on his way to Portugal. 

J. Fife Symington III:
And he wasn’t a good swimmer and he had long, shoulder length hair.  And so I got the boat between Portugal and Bill and he slammed into the boat and I grabbed him by his hair and lifted him up and said, “Would you like a ride?”  And I threw him in the boat.  So he -- I’d forgotten that story completely. I’d forgotten that that had ever happened until we were at a Governor’s Conference together in Seattle, which was my first one and Chelsea and our daughter, Whitney spent the night at our place and Bill and Hillary came up to collect their daughter and he gave Anna a big embrace.  In fact, it really kind of…my eyes…I kind of just…And then he said, “Did Fife ever tell you the story?” and I kind of looked up and then he went on to say, well, he saved my life off – so that’s what happened.  And I got away with covering it up for a long time until Paul Harvey put it on The Rest of the Story and then it -- the news was out and I was in a lot of trouble.  

Audience Member:
What year was that?

J. Fife Symington III:
That was in ’sixty, ’67, I think.  Probably ’67.  Yeah.  Yeah.  I never voted for him.Okay.  Yes, Tracy? 

Audience Member:
How about lobbyists?  There’s a potential effort underway to have -- make it illegal for any government entity to hire lobbyists to lobby the legislature.  What is your opinion of that?

J. Fife Symington III:
I never liked that when I was Governor.  I never liked that.  I thought, you know, the tax – the agencies are paid for with taxpayer’s dollars, that’s money that comes out of the general fund and they should be theoretically controlled by the executive branch.  I have a very traditional view of the role of the Governor.  You control the executive branch of government and you should be able to control it.  You should be able to control the committees that you have the power of appointment to and otherwise, how do you ever bring about change?  If you can’t…if you don’t have the right to control things?  I mean, when you get elected to office like that, you’re a change agent.  So, I really don’t like that.  I don’t like the idea of state agencies.

Audience Member:
County, cities…

J. Fife Symington III:
Yeah. I’ve never been a fan of that.  Never been because it’s taxpayers’ money going to pay them and I would think that you should have somebody on your staff who is capable of working with the Legislature.  But you don’t hire outside lobbyists.  To do that.  That’s my view.  Okay?

Audience Member:
So you hire outside lobbyists to affect government change?

J. Fife Symington III:
Yeah. 

Audience Member:
And that…in your opinion is okay? 

J. Fife Symington III:
No, no, no. 

Audience Member:
Did I misunderstand?

J. Fife Symington III:
Yeah, you misunderstood.  Yeah.  If I were the head of the Department of Economic Security, I would not hire an outside lobbyist to go and do my bidding in the Legislature.  I would use people on my own staff.  I don’t think that government should be hiring outside lobbyists to go do that ‘cause those are taxpayer dollars.  It just doesn’t smell right to me.  Doesn’t seem right.  Any last question on…good, I’ve exhausted…oh!  I thought I’d exhausted all of you. 

Audience Member:
On immigration, border control without control at the employer really – unless you demagnetize the magnet of jobs, you’re never going to stop the illegal immigration, but that may take some pretty tough tools, a national identification or some such to really be able to identify people.  How do you see that?

J. Fife Symington III:
I, you know, I’m ambivalent about creating a really draconian legal environment for American businesses when the failure has been a federal failure at the border.  You know, the federal government has created this problem by -- and they’ve had all the warning in the world from Bush in Texas when he was Governor, when I was Governor of Arizona, we could have secured the border. You know, the areas where they really thought -- concentrated on shutting it down, like south of San Diego, they did. When they moved in on Florida, the Navy and the Coast Guard shut all the smuggling going on off of Florida and that whole coast and it’s a signal failure of the federal government.  So then, the federal government turns around and is gonna crucify American businesses because they hire illegals that are looking for work who have false papers? 

J. Fife Symington III:
I’m ambivalent about all this criminalization of everything.  But saying that, I can see some reasonable laws that protect us from businesses that are knowingly cultivating and hiring illegals, but, I mean, I’ve been involved in the restaurant business and every -- the Italian kitchen that I worked in for six months to learn to be an Italian chef, Franco, you all may remember Franco’s.  I worked in his kitchen for six months.  And it wasn’t an Italian kitchen.  I was the only Anglo in the kitchen.  And they all had papers, but you know, I bet you they were – a lot of them were illegal.  So, if the place is raided and it turns out that there are illegal immigrants and stuff, are you gonna go and throw a guy like Franco in jail or fine him?  When these people walked in the door with a, you know, reasonable documentation?  Or how much of a burden are you gonna place on someone to go and investigate the background of somebody you’re hiring.  And it really, you know, there’s something about that that really bothers me.  Primarily because it’s a federal failure.  They created the problem.  They didn’t enforce the border they way they should have.  So I’d be very careful about laying it all off on American business.  By the way, my first day at work in that kitchen, they were terrified.

J. Fife Symington III:
Because they knew I was the former Governor.  And there I was picking lettuce and cleaning plates and rolling out pasta and stuff.  And they kept looking at me like this, so I knew they were illegal.  They were worried I was gonna report them to the INS. And the turned out to be really great people.  Thank you all very much.