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Shimon Peres
President of Israel
When I was a young man in Israel, our major goal ideologically and otherwise was to become farmers, members of a kibbutz. So I joined in a youth movement that sent me to an agricultural school where I got my main education. There, we organized a small nucleus of boys and girls to go and build a kibbutz, and we went to build a kibbutz, but while doing all this, at school and later on at the kibbutz, there was a great debate taking place in Israel on two major issues. One, who represents the world of tomorrow? The Socialists? The Communists? The Soviet Union, or the democracy, the free world? And what actually does stem from our ideology?
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Shimon Peres
President of Israel
Later on at school, because of my views, I decided to go to Ben Shemen, which is an agricultural school. So I left my studies in Tel Aviv, and I went over to an entirely new life again, living in the fields, among trees, among flowers, milking the cows, riding a horse. Again, it was a different world, but this was really not only a school, but a village of youngsters. So we were running our lives there too, and that's where I believe I got my first taste for social life. And we had different groups, for literature, for ideology, for culture, and as I told you, we made a small nucleus to go to the kibbutz. It was an intimate group. All of us were supposed to tell the truth. We ran a collective dairy. We were 15 or 16, young boys and girls, and the kibbutz was our ideal, it was our destination. But the school, the village, is surrounded by Arabs, and they were shooting at us. So at that same age, I swore into the Haganah, and they are an underground organization. Having the Bible on the table, having a pistol, having a candle. It was a clandestine organization at the time.
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Shimon Peres
President of Israel
Everybody at that time almost totally identified with the country, with the war, with the need to win, and that went on after the War of Independence. When the war was over, I found out that I'm so ignorant. I didn't know a single word of English. Literally, nothing whatsoever. And I hardly have had any formal education. So I came to Ben-Gurion, who was my mentor, and I told him, "Look, I can't go on like this. I have to learn something." I thought I wanted to go to the United States for study. So then, he nominated me to be the head of the Defense Ministry mission in America, in New York, and I worked during the day. I studied, in the evening, at night, at a wonderful school, the New School for Social Research.
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Sidney Poitier
Oscar for Best Actor
One of the preparations I decided was essential to my survival was I had to learn to read. I really had to learn to read. I could read third grade level, fourth grade level. As I told you, I left school at the age of 12-and-a-half. I then decided that I have to learn to read well and I went about that process. That I knew was my goal. The reason was, I realized that in New York there were many streets. Some were numbered, but not all. Some were named. And three syllables, I had great problems with pronouncing three syllables. And every word that had three, four syllables in it, it staggered me. I mean it just defeated me. So I decided that I had to learn to read better because all of the information necessary for my survival came to me, would come to me in words.
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Colin Powell
Former Secretary of State, United States of America
A whole generation of senior officers came up, including me, General Schwarzkopf and many others, who having gone through Vietnam were committed to the proposition that if we ever have to face something like that again, as the senior officers it is our responsibility to work with our political leaders and if necessary push our political leaders to make sure that they understand what they're getting into, and have they made the right political decisions? And they're the ones to determine, you know, what the right political decisions are.
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Colin Powell
Former Secretary of State, United States of America
When we faced conflicts in Panama and in Desert Storm and in the Gulf War, where President Bush and his political leaders working with him, Secretary Baker -- Jim Baker -- and Secretary Dick Cheney, came up with clear political guidance and then supervised us very carefully. It wasn't just, "Okay, here's the guidance, you military folks just tell us what you need and you get it." We had to explain to our political leaders and justify to our political leaders what we needed and why we were going to do things the way we recommended to them. And they challenged us, made sure that they were satisfied that we had thought it all through and then they let us do the job. They turned us loose. That was quite a renaissance.
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