Your last name is Cotton, and this interview was arranged by your communications director, Caroline Rabbitt. Who is your chief of staff, Beatrix Potter? If only. No, my chief of staff is Doug Coutts.

You were raised in rural Arkansas, attended Harvard and Harvard Law and served in Afghanistan and Iraq. What was a bigger culture shock for you? The Middle East and South Asia have a lot less in common with America than 18-year-old kids in Boston have with 18-year-old kids in Arkansas. Teenagers are kinda the same wherever you find them in America.

Your parents were Democrats, and you were 15 when your state’s native son, Bill Clinton, was elected president. When did you become a Republican? That was the beginning of my attentiveness to politics. When he was running, my thinking was, I can’t believe my governor is running for president. By the end of Clinton’s first year in office, I was like, Wow, I must not be a Democrat.

In 2006, you wrote an open letter accusing three New York Times journalists of treason for exposing a secret U.S. program to track the financing of terror networks. Why are you talking to a treasonous newspaper? I would not paint with such a broad brush. But no private citizens, including journalists, have the right to decide what classified information will and will not be disclosed.