He had also joked about an exhibit that displayed his flight suit.

"It was very pristine in the glass case with his name embroidered on it,” Klobuchar said. “And he says, ‘Oh, this is so nice. Thank you. Thank you for finding my flight suit.’ Very polite and we walk away and he whispers to me, ‘That was not my flight.'”

Klobuchar is leaning into her moderate and bipartisan credentials as she tries to build on a fifth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. Iowa was a key state for Klobuchar, who represents the neighboring state of Minnesota in the Senate. But she hopes that moderate voters in New Hampshire can give her a bump in the state’s primary next Tuesday.

In the event hosted by the World Affairs Council of New Hampshire, Klobuchar spoke with two retired brigadier generals, Kevin Ryan and former U.S. Ambassador Jim Smith, both of whom have endorsed the senator in 2020.

Ryan called President Donald Trump’s foreign policy a “disaster” and introduced Klobuchar, hailing her record of supporting veterans and her work on upgrading cybersecurity and the Iran nuclear deal.

“She not only has a vision for America and foreign affairs, but she's already accomplished a lot in that area,” Ryan said.

Klobuchar said Trump’s presidency was eroding “our longheld principles, our alliances and our moral authority when it comes to the rest of the world.” She questioned the Trump administration’s decision to pull troops out of Iran and “leaving the Kurds, our allies, for slaughter.”

“We need a new commander in chief,” Klobuchar said. “We need someone who can command with stability and strength, someone who understands the great challenges of our time, and how they can and should be dealt with by using our country's most important advantage. That is the ingenuity of our talented and diverse population.”

She told the crowd of more than 50 people packed into a small room in Southern New Hampshire University about her “Five R’s” strategy.

The “Five R’s,” which she spoke of in a foreign policy speech last December, include: restoring American leadership, repairing our alliances, rejoining international agreements, responding appropriately to threats and reasserting American values.

“If you have trouble remembering all those Five R's, it can really just come down to one ‘R,’ and that is returning sanity to our foreign policy,” Klobuchar quipped.

Klobuchar told a questioner in the audience that she would leave a small number of troops in Afghanistan for training purposes and counterterrorism. She was hopeful that foreign policy would be a bipartisan conversation no matter what happens in the November elections. She explained her opposition to promising that the United States would not use nuclear weapons first in a conflict.

“The No. 1 goal of a president is to keep America safe and I don’t know what could come at us in another form,” Klobuchar said. “And I don't think we would want to limit our ability to respond.”

Klobuchar was making her case to both New Hampshire and the nation in a televised CNN town hall Thursday, along with Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Deval Patrick.