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Richard Armitage was the 13th United States Deputy Secretary of State, serving from 2001 to 2005. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War and then after the[…]

Richard Armitage urges society to invest in education.

Question: What should we be doing?

Armitage:    In my view we ought to be investing and reinvesting in education, and particularly in technical education.  We ought to find the wherewithal to be able to come up with a health scheme that can be quite robust and satisfy the needs of the great majority of our population.  But we spend our time, as I suggested earlier, arguing things very often which are not very important and leave these big, tough issues unfunded and understated.  I was thinking on the way down here today, Dwight David Eisenhower is the one who is responsible for our great infrastructure – this great network of highways.  A big idea.  Lyndon Johnson had this great society.  Richard Nixon put a man on the moon.  I mean huge ideas.  We seem to be bereft of those ideas.  So I think we need to get a little more comity in our political discourse.  We need to focus on education in a very serious way.  And as I say, get a handle on immigration.  And if we do that, I think we’ll have a pretty bright future.


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