Chautauqua 2010

Thanks to everyone who attended our Sixth Annual Chautauqua. It was the most successful yet. Our purposes for the Chautauqua, which we hold at Mount Madonna each year are to engage in meaningful conversation about our own learning and to discover experience new ways of transforming our work in education. This year we used the three phases of the “learning journey” which are, the “call” the “journey” and the “return” to set context for our discussions. We also conducted the gathering with the intention of bringing art and music more to the center of the learning process. With group facilitation from Peter Block and Vivian Wright, artistic facilitation from Mary Corrigan, Mariah Howard and Avril Orloff and Musical facilitation by Barbara McAfee and Michael Jones and Bob Caplan we accomplished our goals.

Click here to visit the Mount Madonna Chautauqua website.

Ward Mailliard Program Leader

The final act of our journey is the Washington, D.C. Assembly where we invite our school community, families, and friends to hear the experiences of the returning students. This act of witnessing allows the community to understand and appreciate the growth each of the students has made as they talk to those assembled about what they learned on their journey. This is an important moment for both the community and the students. It is the, frequently neglected and yet very significant, “return” stage of the journey. Often there is emotion and pride, and even tears as parents witness their children and their classmates demonstrating new depth and capacity as they enter into a new stage of maturity,. When that happens both the students and the community that has supported them are validated. We all know that something important has occurred.

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Margaret: I’m excited to talk with all of you, especially on your last day.

Ward: I know. It’s quite auspicious.  You know that we’ve been playing with the information in A Simpler Way. For us in a lot of ways it’s been very profound. Okay, you guys take the helm.

Margaret: Yes, I’m eager to hear from you.

Shruti: Thank you so much for talking with us today. We were wondering if you could say something about what made you write a book like A Simpler Way, and where you are now in the development of your ideas.

Wheatley: Well, I have a strange way of writing books, which is that they announce themselves to me. I get a sense that a book wants me to sit down and write it and then I spend quite a lot of time actually tuning in to the voice of the book. That’s the only way that I can write. Whereas, if I really make myself available to the book that wants to be written, then it’s a very different process for me of surrendering. This is something that I have developed over ten years. It wasn’t something that I knew how to do instantly, but I now feel quite confident that this process works for me and is a good use of my skills as a writer.

Now in terms of the ideas in A Simpler Way, I think those ideas have become more and more critical to understanding the world that we are in. I’m amused that right now everyone is waking up to the fact that organizations are networks by studying Al Qaeda. All of us who have been working in the field of living systems have been saying for years that the network is the only form of organization. Every revolutionary group that has succeeded has always used this network form of organizing. Even in our day-to-day lives we survive and thrive by means of the network of relationships that we have with each other. So now I think the ideas in A Simpler Way are much more relevant than ever before.

There are many concepts in A Simpler Way that are very spiritual. We knew that when we were writing it, and it was scary. Therefore it was a much harder book to write, but much more important to write, because it was an initiation into a whole different way of seeing the world. This was true for me personally and also in the kind of work and voice I was willing to give. The whole book felt like a huge risk for me. Now it feels like a “no brainer,” but at the time it was difficult putting in statements like, “we move towards wholeness.” Using the word “wholeness” was hard. I can tell you that in the last chapter of that book, Motions of Coherence, there is a statement that took me a month to put down on paper. It was a statement about oneness, which now feels like an obvious statement. Of course we’re all connected and we’re all one, but I knew as I was writing that last chapter that I was about to make statements that would shift public perception of who I was and that was very scary.

Josh Lewis: You mentioned how you were embarrassed to use the word wholeness. One of the quotes that really stood out for me, that was written in bold type, is that “Life is attracted towards order.” That seemed to be a very key point. One thing that I have noticed is that we have obviously seen higher and higher levels of complexity in life over time, and I was wondering if you thought that order necessitated complexity, or if complexity necessitates order?

Wheatley: In the science of complexity order is actually synonymous with increasing complexity. When a scientist says life seeks order, it means that the direction a living system moves in is towards more complex forms of organizing or more complex systems with more members or varieties and different capacities. It is interesting that in the science, complexity is a measure of orderliness. Then you have to look at the human dimension here. We are creating systems that are so complex that they are unmanageable. The reason is that we are not using natural processes to get there, we are still making these systems up. We’re not having them grow naturally, but developing them through a kind of egomaniac figure right now. It is who can create the biggest bank? Who can create the biggest telecommunications company? We’re creating complexity rather then letting it evolve naturally. So it does not have any of the properties of a complex living system. These are basically unmanageable human created systems. In my own thinking now I am very concerned with issues of size. I watch companies buy other companies and create these mega-corporations which are not manageable at all.

Life does move towards increased complexity, but at the time that it is creating that it creates all the necessary channels of communication and the necessary relationships.

Josh Lewis: So it seems to me that often times when we think of order we think of rigidity which you discuss in these large corporations. Would you say that movement is a necessary component of order, and that moves more towards the natural paradigm?

Wheatley: Yes I would.  One of the shifts that the new science has required is to stop looking at structure and instead look at process. Instead of looking at the product of what you have done together, you learned from the process of what you have done. Life is all about process, which means it is all about change, which means it is all about newness. It is very hard to let go of the western viewpoint that things are finished, they are rigid, or they have a structure. Instead how do you move into a sense of participating in a dance? Again that is one of the great challenges in this change of worldview. How do we move into a process mentality?

Aaron Jacobs-Smith: Earlier you mentioned the greater good, and it seems that a focus on the process would somehow be in conflict with the greater good in a sense. If you were looking towards the greater good you would be looking less at the process. It is like looking toward the future and the end result rather then the change and how it evolves toward that. How do you reconcile this?

Wheatley: I don’t see them in the same problematic way, and I’ll tell you why. I think all the work that we do needs to be grounded in a sense of how it contributes to other human beings. How does this contribute to the liberation of the human spirit? When I say the common good, that is the framework. If I am considering the question of how my particular work affects the common good, first I get into something specific. I may want to work on genetically modified foods, or a homeless shelter. Once you have your focus on how your work is going to contribute to the common good, then the question becomes how do we organize these projects? If we succeed in doing the work well we will have contributed.  We do need a sense of why we are doing the work, a higher purpose. From that sense of what our role is in contributing to the higher good then we figure out how to order our own efforts in ways that make sense.

It is really sad right now because there are so many non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) that have organized in order to serve us, to serve the community. But they have organized in ways that are typically bureaucratic and self-protective so they are not able to bring their compassion into action.  Actually the reason that I think understanding how life organizes is so important because it gives us the opportunity to actually organize our own compassion and causes in a way that we will make a difference, and actually be successful. That success is measured in how we have contributed to the common good.

Group: Santa Cruz, California.

Anthony Weiner: Gotcha, Congressman Farr. He’s a good guy, he’s obsessed with elephants though, you know that? Have you seen his website? It’s all about elephants. He’s a very nice guy, and he gave me a lot of advice. I ran for Mayor this past summer and he gave me a lot of advice on some things that I should say and do. I followed all his advice and I lost the election. Alright, what are we going to do here? Want me to just say a few things and then we’ll do some questions? First of all, give some sense. You’re visiting with other members of Congress?

Group: Yes

Anthony Weiner: And are you doing this as part of an interest? Were you chosen for this, or are you here by choice? And then I should persuade you why you should like it here, or are you here because you desire to be here, and I can explain to you all these intricate things about what’s going on behind the scenes in the United States capital.

Group: The second one.

Anthony Weiner: I worked on Capital Hill right out of college; I worked for my predecessor Chuck Schumer. I didn’t know who my Congressman was, I actually had to look his name up, I was active in some political science stuff, and I did some student government at college. You guys have heard of Harvard?

Group: Yes

Anthony Weiner: I didn’t go there; I just wanted to know if you’ve heard of it. I went to the state university of New York at Plattsburgh, which is kind of the Harvard of Clinton county New York. Up there I did some student government and stuff like that, but decided I want to see Washington. Can I tell a little about our conversation about photographs? I was explaining to Michael on the way here what makes a good photograph for a news letter, and there are certain elements that you have to have. First, there’s got to be some action. So, does this photograph have any action? No. Also, it has to have cute kids, and you guys, I mean you are fine and everything, I’m talking about really cute little kids. Or, if it has a uniform, or an iconic religious figure, like a priest wearing a collar, or a rabbi in my district, or something like that. This has none of them, but it hasn’t stopped Michael from taking about two hundred photographs.

When I came here as an intern, after I got done with my internship I stayed on and worked for Congressman Schumer in the Canon building. I answered letters for him, I eventually did his work on the Budget Committee, I really got a taste of what was exciting about this place, and what I realized, and if you look carefully you’ll see it as well, two things are true that are counterintuitive. One is the place is run by very young people, that the average staffer is in their twenties, that if everyone who was younger then thirty left Capital Hill all at once, the government would clearly come to a complete standstill. That’s not what you think conventionally, you think that “Wow, its people with grey beards, stroking them, thinking the big thoughts of the day,” but there is so much information to process on Capital Hill, there’s so much information now.

We’re in this period where two things are happening simultaneously. One, the issues we’re dealing with are much more complicated than they dealt with at the turn of the century. The amount of information about each issue has doubled and tripled and quadrupled, because technology has made it such that frankly, we’re getting snowed in. Those things have made it so that you need more and more staff to help you with these things. Where have we found them? We have found them in people like you. Frankly, the country, with all of this talk about how apathetic young people are, in fact our government is being run by a generation of young people who are showing a great deal of patriotism and a great deal of interest, and if they weren’t here our government would stop. The other thing that I noticed that was also something that led me to ultimately go into politics, was that while there were five hundred and thirty five elected people who were here, it’s really a handful that wind up carrying a lot of load, that there are people that have a different model for being here that a relatively small number of members wind up doing a lot of the work, depending upon their view of what their mission is.

That means that while you come here, you’re not running the country as one of four hundred and thirty five, if you really hustle you’re running the country as one of a hundred, and then as you get a little more seniority you’re running the country as one of thirty or forty people. My predecessor Chuck Schumer is now the Senator for New York, and he’s the head of the Democratic Senatorial campaign Committees, so he’s active in the party as well, and in just about every issue he’s out there on. Both of those things are things to keep in mind, as you look at the news of the day and you look at the issues we deal with, now that you’re here and you can see a little bit behind the scenes about what is happening, it’s not what at least I was raised thinking Washington was like. That is nourishing, it’s something that is good to see. One final point I’d make, and then I’ll be glad to hear your questions, is that we are in a very strange place in our country that we have an evenly divided country, politically speaking, many issues we are right at that razor’s edge of disagreement on them, and on the issues that we agree upon, like things like Healthcare for example, people agree that we need to improve healthcare. There is a really fractured sense about what it is we do about it. It’s going to get more and more difficult to find common ground on some of these big issues, and as you know from your studies, this is not an accident.

This was the way the founding fathers created the Republic, was that we were going do, in the old parable; we were going to measure a lot before we cut. We were going to do a lot of thinking and pondering before there was a national consensus enough to go do things. When people say, “I’m so frustrated with Washington. They don’t get anything done, Healthcare is a mess, there are millions of people who are hungry, or we need to do more on the mission of greenhouse gases,” it’s not so much that we haven’t internalized the idea that these are problems, it’s just that the system hasn’t quite figured out a way to do things quickly when we don’t have a consensus on a solution. That is why, at the end of the day, ideas triumph. Get a good idea, if you figure out a way to cross the divide and to kind of bring on people that might have a different overall world then you, then things wind up getting done.

Hopefully, there’s a chance for us to do it, we’re generally a country that’s animated by emergencies, and by crises much more then the idea of twenty or thirty year planning. Remember, we are incentivised in thinking in a two year time frame. People say, “Why don’t you invest more in education, because in a generation we’re going to—” Whoa. You want to know what I’m going to do so that you’ll elect me in two years. If you really wanted me to think about what I would do in twenty years I would have a twenty year term, and I’d think about what I’m going to be doing when I’m standing for reelection.

So, you’ve got to realize that some of the challenges we face are also structural. We are rewarded for thinking of things in a certain way, which might not be the best way for us to think. What you’re supposed to have is we, the legislature, might think in that short term, but you have the executive branch, the President, who thinks big thoughts. We have a President who is either unwilling to, or doesn’t desire to, or doesn’t have the capacity to, lead us on the big things of the day. The President stood up, with the power of the Presidency, “We’re going to have a conversation in this country about global warming, the effect of greenhouse emissions.” We would, that’s the way the country works, and this media environment, that’s the way it works. We would be spending that day seeing segments on the evening News, they’d come run around to Congressional opponents, and proponents, and advocates, you’d see segments on all your news; you’d have it in all the newspapers, the debate would happen.

If the President stood up and said, “I want to talk to you about the imperatives of immigration,” like he did a couple nights ago, it dominated the news cycle. Let me conclude with this thought, if you get an opportunity, President Roosevelt, when he gave his “For Freedom” speech, where he famously articulated the freedom from want, the freedom to pray, and worship, it was these very uplifting concepts that he had in the speech. But if you read the speech from the beginning, it’s actually quite a pessimistic assessment of how we’re doing in World War II. He realized that as President, one of the things he had to do, and he had us all get maps to lay out in front of our radio for the speech, he realized that one of his imperatives as a leader was to make us all have a common sense of our goals. We might disagree on stuff, but there are certain things that are common to all of us. We are an aspirational, we want things to get better. He led by saying, “You what, I’m going to explain to people the sacrifices they’re all going to make. One of the things that all happened during World War II was my grandparents, your great grandparents, they said “Let’s save metal, and scrap rubber, everyone is going to go around collecting scrap, and history has told us that we didn’t use it, we didn’t make it into guns, or butter, or tanks, or anything like that. What he was doing was giving us all a sense that it’s not just that they’re fighting over there, but we’re all going to participate in trying to deal with the problem that we were facing at the time. We don’t do that anymore.

The President doesn’t lead us in that type of a discussion. He doesn’t explain to us that, “You know what, there are things that we all want to do. It should be more then just the hundred forty-eight thousand American men and women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan that make the sacrifice, it should be all of us, have some things to do to make the country better. I think it would improve the tenor here in Washington, it would improve our national debate, and ultimately there’s no problem that we can’t solve with the ingenuity, the creativity, the energy, and the wealth of our country. While I can do a lot as a legislator representing six hundred thousand people in New York City, if the President doesn’t show that type of leadership then there isn’t much that we can do, which is why I’m hoping that Casey runs for President, so we can finally have that kind of leadership. I’d be glad to take any questions you might have, whether it’s about a specific issue or the general tenor of things. Alright who are you meeting with next? Who have you met with already?

Group: David Ignatius, Congressman Lewis, Melanne Verveer from Vital Voices, John Lewis, Eileen O’Connor.

Anthony Weiner: You guys have pictures taken with John Lewis?

Group: Yes!

Anthony Weiner: Some day you’re going to tell your grandkids you met him. He is a great man. Not that the others aren’t, I’m just saying John Lewis is iconic, he’s a legendary figure. What are you doing for the rest of the day?

Sadanand Maillard: Well, when we’re done here we’re going to go back and prep for tomorrow, we’ve got three or four interviews a day. Who do we have tomorrow?

Tom Shani: Barbara Lee, Dennis Kucinich, and John Dingell.

Anthony Weiner: Very interesting, those are three interesting cats. I mean Kucinich, I like him, he’s one fry short of a happy meal, but he is someone that keeps us on our toes. Barbara Lee, she is great, and John Dingell is an institution. John Dingell, when he was chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, they used to have, I don’t know if they still have in the Committee, they have this giant picture of the earth photographed from the moon. Once someone asked chairman Dingell, “What is that a picture of?” He said, “That’s the jurisdiction of my committee.” It was the Energy and Commerce Committee, if you think about it energy and commerce, there’s not much you can’t find a way to get into that category. He made great use of it too; he’s also an interesting example of something else. Here he is one of the most senior members of the house, all of us turn to him for advice and council, but he’s also a reflection of something else. He represents Detroit, or represents the suburbs of Detroit, represents Michigan. And so, as the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, he would fight tooth and nail to prevent any expansion of energy efficiency standards for automobiles. He’s doing exactly what he is supposed to do; he’s standing up for his constituents, which manufacture automobiles. That’s not an example of the system not working, although I think he’s wrong and I voted against it, that’s an example of the system working exactly the way it’s supposed to work. That’s why sometimes people say, “Lobbyist this, and lobbyist that,” but at the end of the day, he’s a powerful guy in a position of power who’s standing up for his constituents. That is an important thing for people to understand, that democracy guarantees that you get your say, it doesn’t guarantee that you get your way. That’s pretty good; write that down, I might that use that for the future.

John-Nuri Vissell: In 1991, as the youngest member of the New York City Council, I read you were growing a huge reputation as a legislator and a rising star. How did you achieve all this at such a young age?

Anthony Weiner: I wrote a lot good press releases, apparently. No, I tell you a lot of it was a function of when I came here to work in Washington, after four years here I went and worked for my predecessor in his community office, and working in a local politician’s local office is the single best apprenticeship for a servant. Because, you get to actually deal with the actual issues that people are actually calling about and caring about. I learned the district very, very well, and I also, as part of my job, I would go represent him in the community when he was in Washington. I got a chance to meet many of the community activists, and go to a lot of the community meetings.

What I was kind of doing was I argued to my neighbors, when I ran for city council, I said I’m going to continue kind of doing the same things I’ve been doing for you for the last four years working for Schumer. I’m going to work on your community issue, I don’t have to learn a thing, you know I know all the community events that are going on, the community challenges, because I’m there in the community. A strange thing happened, again you may get this sense from talking to other members of Congress, the idea that I was youthful, and I didn’t have the same life experiences that my opponents do. I was concerned, you know what, and my constituents may see this as a reason not to vote for me. It was the opposite, you’re going to see that idea that you need to communicate is that you have a connection with the people you represent. Not that you agree with them all the time, you have a connection with them.

If people have a sense that you are already part of a political organization, or you’re already part of something that has taken a little edge of you, or sucked a little wind out of your sails, the fact that you are young and you’re untainted turned out to be a huge advantage for me. I ran, I didn’t much support institutionally, but I worked harder then everyone else. When I started running for council, I was 6-3 and 240 pounds. This is all that’s left of me; I knocked on every single door in the district. Any other questions?

Edison Dudoit: Hi, my name is Eddy. During your first term in Congress, what was the most surprising thing you encountered?

Anthony Weiner: It’s a good question. The one thing I was surprised at was an issue thing that I never quite understood, with the level to which I understand now. That’s the different meaning that guns have in different parts of our country. I come from an urban area where guns are viewed as a tool of crime, and where weak gun laws are the reason, frankly, some of my neighbors are victims of crime and are killed. You realized if you get here that there’s a whole cultural level, a whole cultural discussion that guns connote, that I didn’t fully expect, and I was surprised to learn. I learned a great deal, you know the gun rack and the pickup truck is not something you see in Brooklyn.

You understand from talking to people that the debate is an entirely different thing in their ears then it is in yours. I also realized the level to which, and was surprised the level to which, we have become a very suburban country. I grew up in cities my whole life; I grew up in New York City my whole life. I look to my left, look to my right, I’m used to the idea of a city going up, I’m used to people banging of each other like molecules, I’m used to an urban lifestyle. I realize that the reason, it hit me very hard, very quickly, that more and more Americans were more mobile, that more and more of the country, because of the advent of air conditioning, was being populated. The national trend away from cities meant huge disempowerment for me and my brothers and sisters who represent urban areas.

The urban agenda was gradually disappearing from the national debate. That surprised me, I guess I knew it kinds of intellectually that that was going on, but how it impacted policy was something that I didn’t realize. It’s changing now, people are moving back to the cities, and you’re going to realize something else, which I learned when I got hear, we are followers. This notion that we’re leading the country, not really the case. In fact what we’re doing is trying to catch up to every trend, to figure out the way that we legislate about it. That was a little bit surprising to me. Guns and the level to which we have become less and less an urban country were the two things that surprised me the most.

Mark Hansen: Aside from your predecessor, did you have mentors in your rise in politics?

Anthony Weiner: I really didn’t. If you listen the description, right out of college I went to work Schumer as an intern, worked for Schumer, got elected to City Council, and then got elected to Congress taking Schumer’s seat. Chuck kids me that when I came to work for him as an intern I had blonde hair and a little nose, and I had morphed into this more “semiticalectible?” He was a very profound influence on me, because I kind of watch and learned from him. I didn’t have a political club that I went to, and things like that, so that close association not only held me in good stead because I learned a lot from him, but also my association with a popular guy. I only won election to the city council by a couple hundred votes, only got elected to Congress by a couple hundred votes, so you could say that having him as an influence is an important reason why I’m here. I spent a lot of time, particularly when leading up to my run for mayor, reading biographies, of former mayor’s and things like that, and there were some people here who were pretty impressive. Your Congressman is a very impressive guy, a lot of members of the California Congressional Delegation are very impressive, and here are some real giants around here. You’re going to see two of them, Lewis and Dingell are two figures that will be written about in the history books.

Casey Lightner: Hi, I’m Casey. In representing Brooklyn and Queens, which both have diverse populations with people of differing opinions, are there times when you find it hard not being able to represent everyone’s views, and how do you deal with it?

Anthony Weiner: Well, this is philosophical question. Am I the representative of them and their views, or am I the philosopher king? Here’s the way I parse it. On issues that everyone knows and understands, I listen to them pretty carefully. A lot of issues here in Washington are much more complicated and nuanced, and I have a lot more information than my constituents do. I give myself more free reign to disregard the views of my constituents and do what I think is the right thing. I grew up with these people, these are my neighbors, and these are people who I care about very deeply. I understand how they think, but I get things wrong from time to time. People say, “Well, members of Congress always get reelected, how does that happen? So many of them do, there must be something wrong with the system!” Well, in fact a good Congressman kind of develops a sense for what his constituents want and what they aspire to. I very rarely have a situation like that.

My mail was overwhelmingly running against the Iraq war, I voted for it. My constituents, by and large, opposed the patriot act and I voted for it. From time to time I try to lead them, from time to time, I’ll take an issue that they disagree on, and I’ll try to push back on, try to bring them around. I very rarely have a sense that I’m out of step with something my constituents say. Usually, I’m fairly comfortable that the judgments I’m making are their judgments. I got to tell you something else, I read every piece of mail I get, every email I get, every phone call I like to know about, I got to dozens of meetings in the Community all week. If we get done tonight by seven o’clock I’m going to be on a shuttle home to do meetings in my district tonight. So, as much as I may be petty confidant I have a sense of my constituents, it doesn’t stop me from doing everything I can to hear what they have to say.

Nina Castanon: Marc Dunkleman spoke very highly about your compassion for the under-dog…he did I promise –

Anthony Weiner: You met with Marc Dunkleman? You left him off the list. You’re getting Weiner overkill here! In what context did you meet with him? I want to be debriefed on his remarks first.

Nina Castanon: He also said that you were cooler then him.

Anthony Weiner: That’s sweet, but have you seen his hair? My God! By the way Marc is an Ivy League guy, smart as a whip, intuitive on stuff, he could, in any walk of life, be an enormous success. And he’s working here! This notion that young people are like abandoning politics, and everything else, we’re really very lucky that there are people like him all over Capital Hill. Fire away, he says my sense for what?

Anthony Weiner: Your sense of compassion towards the underdog, and I was wondering how is the government working to stop the spread of large corporations trying to build monopolies, and promote small businesses? Furthermore, what can we, as private citizens, do to help?

Anthony Weiner: One of the things that animates me, that gets me up every morning and gets me going is the idea that, and this is something I never quite understood from my Republican brothers and sisters, the powerful, the big business interest, the well-to-do, they’ve got plenty of advocates. They’ve got lawyers, and lobbyists, and advertising campaigns. It is the rest of us that people in this line of work should be thinking about everyday. My constituents, that guy who sits at his breakfast table every morning and looks across at his daughter, and wonders what kind of school she’s going to, and get’s into the subway and get’s to work. He see’s sitting next to him a part-time worker that they hired because they’re saving money on health insurance, which should be the lens that we look at our country through. I don’t think that big corporations are what are wrong with the country; they’re ultimately what are right with the country. What’s right with the country is that we’re a capitalist country that creates enormous wealth, creates enormous opportunity for employment and everything else. We can’t confuse that good outcome with having the best interests of our country always in mind, that’s not their job. There job is to make value for their stockholders, and create wealth. That’s a good thing we want them to keep doing. It should be our job to make sure they don’t pollute our job to make sure they don’t conspire, our job to make sure they don’t abuse their workers, our job to make sure they don’t save on healthcare by forcing people into public assistance. That’s what I think legislature should do, I don’t think they need more advocates; they’ve got plenty of advocates. They’re doing great things, I fundamentally believe in a libertarian sense about how we shouldn’t wade into things where there aren’t problems, and it’s frequently a challenge. Where do you get involved? That’s kind of what animates me, that I think, and that’s why I’m a Democrat, that I think that we’re always fundamentally thinking about how we help individual Americans make their life better, not how we help protect those who already have. Why aren’t you meeting with Republicans?

Group: Putnam, Robert Zoellick in the State Department.

Sadanand Maillard: We tried to get to get into see Shays, but we didn’t.

Anthony Weiner: Yeah, but you’re meeting the wrong kind of Republicans. You got to look in the eyes of the real guys, these crazy, not in touch with the mother ship, one fry short of a happy meal, zealous…I don’t want you to get the idea that Me, Barbara Lee, and Dennis Kucinich represent this country, right now, we kind of don’t. The guys that want to build a giant fence and put cops at the border.

Sadanand Maillard: We met Sensenbrenner one year, my dad was a Republican.

Anthony Weiner: I like Sensenbrenner.

Sadanand Maillard: A moderate, there are not too many moderates.

Anthony Weiner: Sensenbrenner is not really moderate anymore, now that he took over as chairman of the committee. But he has respect for the institution; a lot of people who have gotten elected recently are just such animists for government. They come here, and that’s why all these corruption scandals begin, because they generally don’t believe in this process of debate, and discussion, and compromise. They believe in just kind of whatever is efficient, get it done as quickly as you can. Anyway, I’m sorry.

Edison Dudoit: Who would you suggest we meet, for our next trip?

Anthony Weiner: You’re on the seventh floor of Longworth, so these are the real back benchers up here. These guys have nothing else to do, anyways. I’d literally knock on a door and say, “Do you mind?” I don’t know, you could probably get one of these guys up here. They’re not bad people, but they just have a sense of their own thing that is jus wildly exaggerated, they’re just not that brilliant, but they just think they’ve got all the information they need, they’ve learned everything they need, and they’re ready to go. At least this isn’t being recorded. Any other questions?

Kristin Van’t-Rood: This is kind of going back to the question Casey asked about whether you represent your district, or you vote for how you feel on it. Martha Nussbaum, a classicist, said, “If you go into a situation with some fixed, abstract, principles and you think of the situation just as a scene for plugging in the principles, very often you are not going to see the new challenges. Are there people you work with there are not open to change?

Anthony Weiner: There are. Sometimes it’s difficult; I’ll give you an example from this morning. I’m on the Judiciary Committee, and I spend a lot of time on the Judiciary Committee, fighting to tighten our gun laws. We in New York City are the victim of enormous number of guns that are sold by gun shops out of New York state, that don’t do enough to check people’s identification, to check and make sure they’re allowed to have weapons. These guns wind up on the streets of New York, and people are killed. We had a three year old girl who was killed the other day by an illegal gun. This is my eighth year in Congress, and I’ve gotten seven F’s in a row.

Today in the transportation Committee, one of my colleagues offers this bill, where in response to what happened in Hurricane Katrina, where he said that people who have lawful weapons, that have guns lawfully, that authorities in a state of emergency were going around and seizing their guns. He wanted to have a law banning that, saying that people could keep their own guns. All of my colleagues jumped up and said “No, no, no, we’re not doing that.” I was reading this bill, and I’m like, “You know, I don’t believe in an overly-empowered federal government. I don’t believe in the idea you just declare a state of emergency and you start taking people’s things. I don’t believe in a government that listens to my phone conversations when there is no good reason. I don’t believe in an over reaching federal government, it’s one of the reasons I’m a Democrat, one of the reasons I’m a Civil Libertarian. So, I voted in favor of it. I had the wrath of God on my head; I had every gun group in America saying, “Where did we lose you, where did we lose you?” I think that sometimes we do exactly what was suggested in that quotation, that we kind of develop this sense, walking in the door, which makes it more difficult for us to see.

I’ll tell you something else; it makes us not as good politicians, either, because we walk into traps. We were always saying as Democrats, “We don’t want to take away lawful guns, from people who have them lawfully.” Well, this is a chance to say you don’t want to take away lawful guns. I think that that does happen a lot, it happens to the detriment of a great many people, because if conservatives were intellectually conservative, they wouldn’t be trying to take away women’s reproductive rights, because they would say, “You know what, as a conservative, I believe that government shouldn’t encroach in certain places.” If conservatives believe, for example, in the rights of states, they wouldn’t say, “Let’s take away people’s rights to sue, for certain things, or limit the amount that they can get to protect their business friends. Sometimes we have intellectually consistent people that I really admire for it, and sometimes I have people who I wish would be more consistent. But in answer to your general question, I think that we would all do well to walk into these situations with a certain level of awareness of the other person’s position, and a certain willingness to not react instinctively to some of these issues that may require a little more sophisticated look.

Andrea Schmitt: Hi, I’m Ande. It’s really nice to meet you.

Anthony Weiner: My pleasure.

Andrea Schmitt: Derek Walcott, a poet, said that it takes all your life to write the way that you speak without faking it. I was wondering if you have a similar problem with that when writing speeches.

Anthony Weiner: I don’t write speeches. During the campaign, where I was performing at a much larger stage, the first speech I wrote down, and I was terrible. I just stopped, I don’ write speeches I just speak from a handful of notes and it generally holds me in good stead. It’s much more important to me to have a sense, and I know this from watching other people, that the more important thing is to have a sense that they believe in what they are saying, and that they are actually listening to the debate. Usually what I like to do is I have a couple of thematic things that I like to say, with a couple of factual things to back them up, and usually that’s enough. A lot of the speeches on my website, that’s the way they were written, but I didn’t give them, for the most part, in that way.

Alyssa Debenedetti: My name is Alyssa. We heard also from your chief of staff, Marc Dunkleman, that you’re an avid fan of hip-hop. A common theme in our recent interviews is the language with which my generation has been leaning towards. As a fan of rap, which has a habit of adding to this degradation of language, how you feel we can change our current language patterns.

Anthony Weiner: Look, I think that the written word and the spoken word has been degraded over the course of time, it’s the source of some puzzlement to me why that’s happened. We aren’t reading as much as we used to, we aren’t focusing as much on language as we used to in the school room, I don’t why, there’s something. I watched “Good Night and Good Luck,” last night, and you listen to the weird stylized way they spoke in the fifties, and the forties, and you realize that that wouldn’t be considered at all stylized, it’s degraded a lot since the 20′s. Then you go even further back, and you look at the Victorian era way of speaking, which was even more stilted, I don’t know if it’s gotten better or worse, and I don’t know what it’s a product of. I think more then anything it’s probably a product of the fact that our country has gotten even more multi-cultural then it was at the turn of the century, when our grandparents and parents came. I’m not terribly, terribly concerned about it, I think hip-hop recently has been carrying an awful lot on it’s shoulders, it’s getting an awful lot of blame for an awful lot of things, that at the end of the day it’s probably what we’re seeing is that we are still figuring out as a people how to deal with this environment, where you have so much input, in such kind of a weird and inefficient way. We’re deluged with different symbols, and sounds, and images, and I bet you our kids are going to have a much better way of organizing all that information so that we figure out a way to deal it all, in the long form spoken word, in the long form written word, and maybe things will be better then. You see it even on the floor of Congress, people butchering the language pretty badly. It’s not just something that is going on in the world at large, some of he most sophisticated people you see bollixing up the English language. I don’t think it has anything to do with Grand Pooh-Bah, or anything like that.

Daniel Nanas: Do you think there is some transference of the religious evangelism of this administration onto cause of spreading democracy?

Anthony Weiner: Yeah, but that’s not bad. It’s a good thing. We have to discern a difference between religiosity, being a religious country, being a religious people, that’s a good thing. It’s something that animates us in our walk of life, or we’re from. That’s by and large a good, I mean there’s some teachings that are less desirous then others making their way into public policy, but if we all started by observing the ten commandments around here we’d a much better Congress. The problem becomes that a sense of religious zeal starts to trump your sense that people have different opinions, and people have different views, and people come at things from a different perspective. I gave speech during the campaign about how we, as democrats, we’re the party of faith. We’re the ones that want to feed people who are hungry and want to make sure they can live out their aspirations, which can observe their religious freedoms. We’re that party we’re the party of faith. If hey animates the President, or animates our Congress to want to export democracy overseas, that’s a good thing. We should want people to be able to live out their aspirations, and be free to choose their own religious path. I think that ultimately democracies lead you in that way. I think that we have to be careful that we don’t mistake what the problem is. The problem that many of us find with this White House, is that their sense of their religion gives them a sense that they don’ care what other people say, because they have this divine sense of what’s right. That’s what is troubling. I disagree with President Bush on just about everything, but I can tell you this. He’s right when he says that other countries having democracies is a good thing. He’s right when he says that should be one of ways that we discern our foreign policy. In the 70′s, we were propping up dictators and our only discernment was, “Is he good to us?” So we had dictators propped up with our help, oppressing people, hurting people, all over the globe. The one thing we’re doing in Iraq, and if it really is going to be part of our foreign policy going forward, we should see that people are able to choose their own destiny. If he get’s that sense because he’s a religious man, it’s a good.

Daniel Nanas: So, is spreading democracy as important as perfect it here at home?

Anthony Weiner: I think that is a false choice. While China and India are having economic growth in the double digits and we’re concerned that our economic growth is only four or five percent, you know real incomes in sub-Saharan Africa have dropped in the last ten years. Those people are getting poorer, and remarkable as that is, the poorest people on earth are getting poorer. I don’t believe that if people had some control over their government, that if they had over their destiny, that they wouldn’t be better off. I can be upset that they stole the election in Florida, and still say I want to export democracy to parts of Latin America that sill don’t have it. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I think that’s what our ideal should be, now. How we do it, and whether we do it with boots on the ground or whether we do it by other methods. I think it’s a false choice, I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can have a better country, and have a better country overseas.

Jonji Barber: I’m Jonji. In our interview with Marc Dunkleman, he told me about a bill that you were working with another Republican Congressman, the one with the things eating trees.

Anthony Weiner: The beetles!

Jonji Barber: And how the support of the Republican aided you in strengthening the bill.

Anthony Weiner: This is the beetle the insect, not the other guys.

Jonji Barber: Whenever I turn on the news or watch the news, I only see the hostility and the trouble between the parties. I was wondering if you see this competition as bettering or taking away from our democracy. As a young democrat, are you working with young Republicans to insure a healthy, coexisting future?

Anthony Weiner: Its two things. First of all, it’s your fault. Not you personally. We reward conflict, in this country, we like it. We like sports, we like a nice, tense debate; this is what we look for. We like the idea, TV stations are rewarded for it, politicians are rewarded for it, and we’re in a period of time when people are looking for this more and more and more. That’s basically the foundation of a democratic republic, which you need to have the conflict of ideas. It’s the conflict of how the judicial system works, it’s a conflict of ideas, and it’s the foundation of how the Socratic Method works. The problem is that if that becomes the end, rather then the means to a compromise, then we’re on the wrong track. That, I fear, is where we’ve gotten too much. Now, the fight is what is almost the outcome.

I spend more time, probably, and then I should going on these cable shows, where they put up split screen. I’m pretty good at that just because I talk fast, and I fight dirty, so they love me on these shows. The producers, when they’re doing these shows, they make it very clear to you that they want you to have an oppositional view, the last thing they want to here you say is, “My learned friend is right about that.” They want volume, and they want you to go at it. If you want to get on one of these shows, just call up and say, “I’m prepared to rip this guy’s lungs out,” and they’ll put you on. It has had a corrosive effect on our debate in the country, and hopefully we’re going to start to regulate it ourselves as citizens. Part of what is happening is this onslaught of information; we haven’t quite figured out how to process it. What we want and what we don’t want, what we need and what we don’t need, so everyone is going in that same direction of having people yelling at each other in the context of this debate.

There’s this old New Yorker cartoon, it’s behind the scenes, after the circus is done. It’s got three easy chairs, one has the lion tamer, and the two lions are there reading newspapers, you know, and they’re all sitting back, waiting to go on state. They’re going to pretend to be ferocious, and he’s going to pretend to tame them. There’s a little of that here, too. We all basically get along well, we yell at each other then we go have a cup of coffee in the Greenroom and joke about it a little big.

The problem is the show; the conflict is becoming the end in and of itself. We’re rewarding people for being good at that. People that get elected, the people that get on these shows are pretty good at that. What I would be, until consumers of information start saying, “You know what, I’d much rather have the MacNeil/Lehrer report, the News Hour model, where you spend twenty minutes talking about an issue. One person talks, then another person talks, then other person actually responds to that person, and somebody responds to that person, and until that starts to happen you’re going to keep having these shouting shows.

In conclusion, three or four weeks ago there was this debate on immigration on Meet the Press, with two of my colleagues. It was Gutierrez, Luis Gutierrez, from Chicago, IL, and JD Hayworth from Scottsdale, Arizona. Hayworth advocating building a fence and being against legalization, while Gutierrez advocating his proposal to have a path to earn legalization. Gutierrez spoke for maybe two minutes, and Hayworth just went on and on and on, getting increasingly hot, just banging, and Gutierrez creamed him. He seemed reasonable, he knew that in the context of what they were talking about these were issues that many Americans don’t have this kind of assuredness about their position, and they’re torn on it too. He sounded reasonable, and JD Hayworth got all hot under the collar and yelled too much, and didn’t realize he wasn’t on Fox News at the moment, and it wasn’t just feeding red meat. What’s going to happen is, as we all get more comfortable, remember what I said to you earlier, we’re not the leaders, and we’re kind of following.

We’re learning in this technological era what ways to make debate, what works, what appeals and what doesn’t. God willing, in twenty years, when we’re sitting here, we’re going to have a different type of debate coming over these big TV’s and on our laptops, and on our Ipods. It’s going to be a different tenor, because we, as consumers of information, are going to start rewarding politicians who deal with things in a different way. We’re going to start rewarding, as younger voters; we’re going to start rewarding people who take the time to make an appeal to younger voters, who take the time to talk through issues with them. Later on people are going to say, “You know what? It pays for me to have this conversation with younger voters, because there are going to be more of them voting and because they are going to start internalizing the idea that they are important, etc. etc.

I think we’re in a period that technology has completely overwhelmed the process, which we know we have more information, and it’s coming at us in droves from all different ways. We don’t quite know how to handle it; the media doesn’t know what to do, so it’s kind of like feeding the Christian’s to the lion’s time. It’s going to take a little while to get this word out, but I can tell you this. Our country is too strong; it is too brilliantly a divine system that we can’t weather this. We will, thing’s will level out, we’ll solve the big problems, we won’t do it terribly efficiently, there will be times when you will be pulling your hair out watching TV, but at the end of the day, to paraphrase Clinton badly, “These are American problems, we’re American people, and there’s nothing that we can’t figure out.” It’s just going to take us a little time, and fortunately we have people like you who are coming up through the ranks, that, when we completely screw things up, you’ll mop up our mess when you get there. Thank you very much for taking the time. While you’re here in time, drop your name wherever you go. I’m a big wheel around here, just say, “Weiner said it was alright,” and see if that get’s you anywhere.

Sadanand Maillard: What’s your word of advice for these guys on your way out the door?

Anthony Weiner: I gave you some pretty profound stuff at the end there, but generally speaking don’t believe the short hand slogans for what is wrong with the country. It’s very easy to say, “The parties are all the same,” they’re not, we’re wildly different. People are apathetic, and they’re not. I represent New York City; I saw twenty one, twenty two, twenty three year old running into the South Tower of the World Trade Center to their death. Those were young people. People who are fighting for us in Iraq and Afghanistan are young people; people who run this place are young people. The mythology of the apathy of youth is baloney. Don’t buy the idea that all the important issues get ignored, while the baloney one’s get followed, there are other ways to determine what is going on in the world then what they are focusing on in MSNBC.

There are a lot of very important things that people are trying to sort out, and they are doing it. In the end of the day, there are many, many ways too change the country in the context of a representative democracy. One of them, and it’s only one of them, is to run for office. I would encourage you do it, we are becoming a playing field that is having a lot more people coming on to the field recently whose qualifications are defined by the large amounts of money they have in their pockets. If we have people start to come out to the field because of their enthusiasm, and because of their ideas, and because of there sense that things should change. That’s the way our country changes, and remember one final thing. We are a young country, we’ve only been doing this a couple of generations, and we’re still sorting this stuff out. Every year with technology the advances that we are making are exponential form the time before, and we will just about have it right at the time you guys start paying taxes, and it will be great. Thank you very much.

Gary Walters: Thank you very much. It’s always been a joy to have an opportunity to talk to the young people that Ward has brought to the White House here over the years. I’ll just give you a little bit of background as to what my job is here at the White House. I’ve had the incredible opportunity to serve seven presidents; everybody since President Nixon forward. I started here at the White House in 1970, so I’ve done something right, because they’ve let me stay around this long. Either that or I’ve gotten buried so deeply they don’t know where I am, but it’s kind of hard for the presidents to get away from me, because I have an opportunity to meet with them every morning as they walk to work. President’s walk is come down the elevator and walk about 150 steps to the Oval Office. So I’m there when they come down in the morning, and that gives me an opportunity to address them with any concerns that I might have, or any thoughts that I might have on things that are going on during that day. It’s also allows them to address me with their concerns, which are much more important than mine in most cases, certainly.

The usher’s office is responsible for the operation of the executive residence of the White House, which partially includes this building that we’re standing in, because the White House is comprised really of three separate buildings. The executive residence is the part where the president lives, that’s the part you’re all probably the most familiar with, where we have the Blue Room, the Red Room, the Green Room. The East Wing here that you just came in to, this building was built during the second world war in 1942, originally this was an entrance off of East Executive Avenue after 1902 that allowed people to come in – there were some minor offices over here – it was a rather small facility. But in 1942 it was built up to where the president’s congressional liaison offices are partially in this building, first lady’s staff as her growth and her staff has occurred in this building, the Secret Service have a facility in the building here, the White House visitor’s office – Dory Thornton was here just a moment ago, she is a part of that operation. So this building has grown in stature through the years.

The other part that most people think of when they say “the White House” is the political White House, and that’s the West Wing. Of course, there’s also a TV show now called “The West Wing.” I have to be honest, I’ve never watched it. Don’t intend to, because I lived with this every day, I don’t need to watch it on television. It’s fictionalized; I don’t know whether any of you have seen it or not, but I’m told that one of the things that people who do watch it that have some familiarization with the White House is that the halls, there’s always people crossing and there’s a lot of activity. The West Wing is like a library. There’s six people in the halls during the course of the entire day, people are working over there! There’s not all this activity going back and forth. …So, enough social commentary on the TV show.

The West Wing was built in 1902. Up until 1902, the executive office of the president was comprised of two rooms on the second floor of the White House, which are now the Lincoln and the Queen’s bedroom suites, and that’s where all of the offices of the president were. Of course, up until 1902, the United States was this new country that really didn’t have much going for it, and it really hadn’t entered on to the world stage. And with Theodore Roosevelt being as dynamic of an individual and being a young president came in to office, he also had seven children. The White House got kind of small really quick with that number of young people running around. His certainly ideas of expansive position of the United States in history, and that’s when the West Wing was built, in 1902. To this day when you hear people say “today the White House said,” they’re talking about the West Wing. I’m still looking for that mouth; the White House has never had a mouth, but that’s the first thing that the reporters say: “today, the White House said,” and normally they’re talking about the political White House.

The chief usher’s responsibility – I have a staff of 95 people who take care of the executive residence. I’m also responsible for the grounds on which the White House sets, which is approximately 18 acres. The National Park Service has the White House grounds as “Reservation #1″ in the National Park Service system, and they provide a staff of 34 people to take care of the grounds, and I have a superintendent that’s on my staff who supervises probably one of the only places in the government where I supervise another agency’s employees. It’s kind of an interesting juxtaposition there. But that’s the way the White House is operated.

Actually, some of the other contrarian kind of circumstances in management of the White House is that both the West Wing and this building are owned by the General Services administration, and administered by the General Services administration because they’re office buildings, and that’s government offices administered by the General Services administration. So it’s kind of an unusual circumstance; there’s a lot of interacting agencies – the National Park Service, as I said, I work very closely with them because they’re actually the site on which the White House is set, which is “Reservation #1″ in the Park Service system. They also have a responsibility for the exterior of the building, which is kind of curious that they don’t have any responsibilities for the inside.

Then the military have activity here at the White House. Certainly the president as Commander in Chief has to have a military component here at the White House. When the president flies off by the helicopter – you’ve all seen the helicopter go in and out I’m sure on television – that’s obviously a military operation and that’s run by a military office, which is located upstairs here in this building. Then the General Services administration, there’s a lot of other activities and agencies that are associated with the White House.

My staff of 95 is responsible for the operation and maintenance of the executive residence. That includes butlers, maids, kitchen staff – the chefs, the pastry chef – engineers, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, the pay shop, florists who take care – and you’ll see as you go through today, there are floral arrangements. There’s one on the table back there, they’re wonderful roses, very nicely done. Throughout the house, we have floral arrangements. They’re not dried flowers, because in my tenure here, there have been a lot of recommendations from a budget standpoint and also a personnel standpoint, “why don’t we do dried flowers? That way they don’t have to change very often.” The White House is not a static environment. It’s a museum – I have curators on my staff that take care of the curatorial responsibility at the White House – but the White House it a living environment, and I feel that it’s very important that when people come through here, they understand they’re coming through the president and first lady’s home, and live, fresh flowers is part of that ambience, as it is for various events that we have, including the most formal, which is a state dinner; a visit of a foreign head of state to the White House.

So I have a really varied staff and I get involved in a little bit of everything, whether I like it or not. Just before I came over and met with you all, I was over on the West side, and we were talking about taking out trees and putting in new trees, because the old trees are dying because root balls aren’t large enough and we don’t have enough drainage. So I get involved in a little bit of everything. As Ward said in his opening remarks, I have an opportunity from time to time to put hoses out and sprinklers and everything.

All of us that work in the executive residence have a job title. That job title begins with a description of what position they’re hired in, but the last part of that is probably more important than anything else, and that’s whatever is required. So we can have an electrician or a carpenter and that’s there job title, but the last part of that is “you’ll do whatever you’re required to do,” and everybody here understands that. And it’s not something that’s forced upon people.

The majority of the people that come here – unlike the political staff – that are on my staff either retire from the position or they leave early on in their career, in the first five years. If they stay past five years, normally they’re here for their entire career. Now from a political standpoint, people are looking at four or eight years at the outside; one administration or two administrations. But very seldom to people stay an entire administration. Let’s face it: if you’re going to be out of here after four years, come that third year, you’re starting to look for another job. Or in this case with this president and the former president also President Clinton, you get to that seven-year mark, and there is no four-year extension. So there’s a lot of people that are – you’ll see that occur, if you didn’t in the previous administration, the Clinton administration, maybe you weren’t attuned to it at that point, certainly as you get towards the end of this administration there will be some additional changes, because people will have been here and they’ll be starting to look for other jobs, so there’ll be some turnover.

Our staff, at one point we had – the average tenure of the residence staff was in excess of 22 years. And that was the average tenure of the staff. As I said, I’ve been privileged to be here now 36 years. My predecessor had been here in various capacities for 27 years, so there are a number of people who have spent long careers here. We had one gentleman who spent 43 years here, he was our chief electrician. He spanned back to President Truman, when President Truman lived across the street in Blair House across from the White House and the White House was rebuilt, and he remembers walking fire watch at night through the excavated building. So there’s a lot of history in our staff that’s embodied in what we do on a daily basis.

We take care of the president and the first lady from a home aspect. The three jobs that we have and that I particularly am in charge of are number one: the president’s home. That’s the first and foremost. That comes out in everything we do. We’re taking care of the president’s home. Secondly, it’s a museum, and it has items like you’ll see today when you go up in the East Room, the portrait of George Washington that’s on the wall in the East Room is the most valuable possession the White House has. It’s the very first item that was purchased by the Congress for the White House, and it’s the only item that’s been continuously in the possession of the White House since it was presented. It’s the famous portrait that Dolly Madison had taken off of the wall and the frame was smashed and she had it rolled up and taken to Georgetown, when the British came through and burnt the federal buildings in Washington – including the White House – in the war of 1812. Actually occurred in 1814, the house was rebuilt in 1817.

You’ll have an opportunity in the Blue Room to see furniture that was actually purchased by President and Mrs. Monroe for the house in 1817 when the house was rebuilt. Quite curiously, the furniture was ordered from France from a firm called Balenge They ordered it in dark mahogany, and when it came, it was gilded. They went back to the firm and said, “Wait a minute, this is not what we ordered.” And they said, “For his Excellency the President of the United States, plain wood will not do, it must be gilded. So you’ll get an opportunity to see that when you’re up in the Blue Room. Blue Room is also where we put the Christmas tree; maybe you’ve seen the Christmas tree at the White House at Christmas time it goes in the space in there. We take the chandelier down, the Christmas tree goes in the chandelier’s position, it actually hooks off to the top of the tree to the chandelier support because that’s where we get the electricity for the lights on the tree, and also we don’t want somebody pulling on the tree and having an 18 foot, 6 inch tree fall over in the room, so we tie it off to the chandelier up there.

That’s pretty much an overview of what I do, what I get involved with, and what we’ve had a good opportunity to do is have an exchange with you all. I could sit here and talk, but you have interests, and I think it’s been helpful over the years for me to answer some of your questions and give you a perspective as I answer the questions if that’s okay. So if anybody has any questions, we can go forward. I’ll be glad to answer them as best I can.

Daniel Nanas: It seems that your background prepared you for more of a career in criminal justice. I’ve read after your service in the army that you worked in the Secret Service. How did you make the transition into the usher’s office from such a different background, and how has your background contributed to the work you do now, which seems pretty inclusive?

Gary Walters: The transition for me was out of the military into a job – because I hadn’t finished my college when I went into the military – so I made a transition, I was looking for a job where I could work on a pretty regular basis and go back to college and finish my schooling at night. And the Secret Service here in Washington had just expanded in 1970 from the White House police – which is a force of about 100 people – to what they referred to as the “Executive Protective Service,” which was an expansion under the Secret Service, and at that time, that group was taking over the protection of the diplomatic entities here in Washington; the embassies and chancelleries. So they were doing a large expansion and I had an opportunity to do that because it gave me some money and it also allowed me to go to school at night. So I was able to finish up my schooling; at the end of that, I was in a pretty good position. I took some criminal justice because I was in the police field at that time, and I also took some business because I figured that’s where I really wanted to go. I got my degree in business administration, and it just so happened that in the office that I’m working in now – the usher’s office – they needed somebody to take care of the budgeting, because the fellow who had been doing it for the National Park Service passed away.

So I found myself in the right place at the right time. I’d been working with the office in my capacity with the uniformed division of the Secret Service, who I was with from 1970 to ’75, and was fortunate enough to make the move, though what I had learned up to that point certainly in college and through my high school career in the business field assisted me in getting my foot in the door. But the thing that really has helped me more than anything else was a diversity of knowledge and an ability to adapt and really common sense. Trying to follow on one thing to another and put the pieces together and try and be ahead of the game a little bit. Those are the things I think that have been the most helpful.

As I’ve said to people that I’ve had an opportunity – young people in particular – it doesn’t matter where you start, its how much effort you put in to what you do. If you start as a janitor and you become the best janitor in the world, you can probably become a supervisor, and once you become a supervisor, there’s no limit to what you can do from that point forward. So any job, any position that anybody takes on, you just have to put your total effort in it. If you’re not happy doing it, get out and find something else, because you’re not going to do yourself a service, you’re not going to do anybody else a service if you’re disgruntled with what you’re putting forth. So the best thing you can do is get involved, stay involved, do the very best you can do, and if you’re not satisfied with what you’re doing, move on. Does that answer your question?

Daniel Nanas: Yes, it does.

Gary Walters: Okay.

Mark Hansen: Hi, my name is Mark.

Gary Walters: Yes?

Mark Hansen: Did you choose this particular career, or do you think it sort of chose you?

Gary Walters: Exactly. It chose me. I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Actually grew up here in the Washington area. My father’s brother used to come in – this is a number of years ago – back in the ‘50′s, and spray the White House lawn to kill bugs and things on the lawn, and I used to drive by, my father actually worked here in Washington as a bus driver. I never thought I was going to be inside the gate; of course I came in like everybody else did. You know, tour, had friends in from out of town, that’s when you go to the White House. But I never dreamed of working inside these gates. It’s been quite a privilege, and I’ve had an opportunity to see a huge amount of history in the years that I’ve been here. But no, I think that I was in the right place at the right time.

Prabha Sharon: Hi, I’m Prabha.

Gary Walters: Yes ma’am?

Prabha Sharon: If it was my first day of work here, what advice would you give me?

Gary Walters: I’ve given you some of it: give it your best shot.

Get familiar with the circumstance. Understand the work environment that you’ve been thrust in to. You have to have some perspective in what you’re involved in. You might be doing a small piece of it – there’s a lot of young people who come and put internships in at the White House and they want to look at the big picture, and that’s great to get a perspective, but you still have to focus on what you’re given to do. But you do need that perspective. You need to know how you fit into the puzzle.

The last three presidents, oddly enough, have all enjoyed putting puzzles together. It’s a relief, they can concentrate on doing it, and I’ve seen some unbelievable puzzles that they’ve done. There’s a company out in the Midwest someplace that makes them out of wood and their hand-painted and they put them together. I don’t know whether the father gave it to President Clinton and passed it on to the son, I’m not sure how that worked, but they’ve all found it a relief to have a puzzle – an ongoing puzzle – that they work upon. And if you leave one piece out of that puzzle, it’s incomplete. So you’ve got to have a perspective; look at the whole thing, and come up with a complete picture and that last piece, no matter how tiny it is, that’s what completes the puzzle.

Kristen van’tRood: Hi, my name is Kristen. What was your first day at the White House like?

Gary Walters: I had an opportunity to be here, as I said, with the uniformed division of the Secret Service, which at that time was called the Executive Protective Service, and my first introduction here was… We went to classroom studies, had to learn a lot, and then we were brought over here to walk around and see the different positions, because as you may have noticed in the short period of time you came in, you went through a number of different police posts; as you came through each gate, there was a different set of policemen. Those are called “rings of security.” In the outermost ring is where the youngest people are.

So my first few impressions here were as a police officer and walking around the outside. And the realization that I was actually on the inside where most people wanted to be – I’ve told this story before. I was working right out here at this post on East Executive Avenue. East Executive Avenue used to be open to the public, used to be a thoroughfare street that was open. That didn’t get closed down until after bombing in Beirut in the Reagan administration. I had a woman come up to the gate one evening about dusk and she said, “I’m only in town for one day, and I can’t get in to the White House to see the White House. Would you pick a leaf off of the tree and give it to me? I have to have some memento of being at the White House.”

I mean, that profoundly affected me; the fact that these people were on the outside of the gate, and this woman wanted a leaf from inside to just take with her. So my first day was really a day of feeling my way around the outside and getting an idea of what goes on inside the gate, but on the outside perimeter. I don’t know whether that answers your question or not, but that was really the first impression I had of the White House, it was really being on the perimeter, but yet being inside a place that everyone else wanted to be.

Jonji Barber: Hi, I’m Jonji. Is there a perspective you can share with us that will further our understanding of the White House? One that we couldn’t get from our media or a regular tour?

Gary Walters: Don’t take your information from one source. It will never work, because regardless of how people try and portray what the White House is, or what the White House is saying, or what the administration is trying to put out, they have to put their own feelings into it. I am not a big fan, I have to be honest, of disclosure of the press. There’s too much inflammatory speech. Instead of a fire, it’s roaring inferno. I don’t think that necessarily describes every fire. There are great people in the press, but over the years, I’ve watched the deterioration of the coverage, and a lot more commentary as opposed to who, what, where, when and how. So my suggestion would be don’t take your information from one source. It’s just like doing a term paper. You know, one source is you’re plagiarizing something. Get it from lots of sources and try and figure out your own perspective, because I think that’s the only way you’re going to learn more than just what the reporter’s giving you. You can get some more information from different sources.

Sadanand Mailliard: Jeremy?

Jeremy Thweatt: When everything you do in the White House is important, do you ever find it challenging to prioritize different things you have to do?

Gary Walters: That’s probably my most important job. I have a staff that I have to direct, and I need to tell them what to do, and it’s my job to put those things in order. And it can become confusing. Things change on a moment’s notice. I came in to work this morning and found out the new prime minister of Israel is coming today for a press conference with the president, followed by a meeting, followed by a dinner. When I came in this morning, I found out that the president decided that he wants to have a one-on-one meeting with the prime minister, while the other staff members have a separate meeting in a different location, and that the dinner is going to be pushed back 45 minutes.

So there was a priority there for me: I had to let the chef know that the dinner was going to be later. I had to let the pastry chef know. I have to let the butlers know, I have to let the florists know. From that one simple change – 45 minutes later – we had a lot of fallout; also, the fact that the president is going to meet one-on-one with the prime minister. Where is that going to occur? It’s going to occur somewhere in the residence, I assume it’s going to occur in the president’s office, so I had to ask the president on his way to the office this morning if that was in fact the case.

So there’s a lot of putting things in priority order that I have to do, and I find myself being a coordinator. The staff is a very professional staff, been here for a long time, they know what to do and they just need the information to carry it out. I’m not about to serve the meal, that’s the butler’s responsibility. But I can tell the butler what time to come to the kitchen to get the meal to go serve it. So I end up being the coordinator and putting things in priority order is really the operation that I have. I have myself, one primary assistant and three other assistants. One of them that gets here about 5:00 in the morning and works until 2:00 in the afternoon, a second one that comes in about 1:30 in the afternoon – there’s about a half an hour change over – and stays here until whenever the president retires for the night, because we’re here at their beck and call. And the third person is off. So we rotate a three person rotation underneath me that’s here to manage the operation in the executive residence at all times. It’s really our responsibility in the usher’s office to manage that staff, and putting things in order is our responsibility.

…It’s all coming from this side, there’s got to be something from over here…

Sadanand Mailliard: Seychelle?

Seychelle deVries: Sorry. Hi, I’m Seychelle. You talked earlier about the importance of keeping a certain ambiance, you talked about the fresh flowers and things like that. I was wondering, since it’s so important to keep a certain atmosphere here, do you think that the atmosphere of the White House affects the political going-ons, and affects the business that is in here?

Gary Walters: To some degree. Obviously, a lot of what we do in the residence, especially when you have a state occasion, the political work that the president does is usually done one-on-one with the head of state that’s visiting. A lot of that is done in meetings beforehand or in the oval office. But the state dinner is the social occasion that allows people to relax a little bit, and the ambiance that’s afforded by the certain things that we can do. When there’s a head of state that’s coming, we’re notified by the state department of various activities. Colors that we shouldn’t use; flowers that shouldn’t be used; certain colors of flowers that shouldn’t be used, because there are certain cultures around the world where chrysanthemums are flowers of death, so you can’t use chrysanthemums, there are certain colors – yellow – that can’t be used. So there’s a lot of fallout that comes from that.

The kitchen… we never try to do the cuisine of another country. We can’t do it as well as they can, so why even try? But having some flavor of that country… Recently, we had… what was it… it was a fish that we just had…. Australia! The last state dinner. We had an Australian fish. Well that fish was originally a native fish to Australia, but it is grown in this country now, in Massachusetts to be exact, at a fish farm. So we used that fish as the first course for that dinner. Of course, the Australians immediately recognized that this was a native fish, and so we had that kind of connection. The dessert – we usually try and connect the dessert with the head of state, so that we have some kind of connection there.

If we get an idea of what the interest is. I’ll give you a little heads-up, is the prime minister of Japan is coming in June. He happens to have a great interest in Elvis Presley. He’s going to make a trip to Graceland. And here at the White House, the entertainment we’re going to have that night is going to be a – possibly, we’re not sure yet – but could possibly be an Elvis impersonator. So we try and bring to the social occasion a realization of the importance, obviously, of the occasion, but also a connection with the foreign head of state to bring that ambiance if you will and allow the guest to feel that the president and the first lady have done something in their behalf to recognize them.

The music that’s played during that night. We’ll pick up the military – we, that’s easy for me to say, I say “we” all the time, there’s all these other people doing all these wonderful things – the military band, the marine band, will go back and look for traditional folk songs to incorporate in the music for the evening. So there’s a lot of things that are done like that to try and bring that social occasion into the political realm and make the guest feel comfortable.

Nina Castañon: Hi, I’m Nina. What has been the most meaningful experience that you’ve had here at the White House?

Gary Walters: That’s an easy one. Obviously having the perspective dealing each and every day with the first family one-on-one, I don’t read it in the newspaper, I don’t see it on television, I do it one-on-one. So that’s the most important.

The most impact on me personally was when President Gorbachev came in the Reagan administration. And there was so much tension. There was one particular day, it was early in December, it was my first year as the chief usher, and the two gentlemen with this icy cold – it was after President Reagan had met in Reykjavík and there had been a very cold departure between the two gentlemen – and he came to the White House and they signed a treaty in the East Room. Then they went to the state dining room, and we had set up in the state dining room only the second time in the years that I’ve been here that the state dining room fireplace was lit, and the two gentlemen spoke from individual podiums on either side of the room with the fireplace in the background, and they spoke to the world, literally at that time. And there was a real symbolism there, and I have to say that Michael Deaver who worked here and was in charge of pictures, if you will, for President Reagan, really set this up just absolutely beautifully, because you literally could feel the melting of the cold war at that time. The symbolism of the fireplace and the two gentlemen speaking to the world, these two world leaders that were the two supreme powers at that time, and it was quite a moving day.

Megan Mitchell: Hi, I’m Megan. As you described earlier, you’ve been here for 36 years and seen seven presidents come and go, and I was wondering if there is a certain common aspect between these presidents that distinguishes them from other people?

Gary Walters: Well, they got elected.

Yes, there is. I’ve seen a phenomenon that I can’t describe, other than to say I’ve watched each and every one of these presidents who can be dead tired – I mean, if it were me, I’d be in a corner sleeping somewhere – and they draw strength from people. And I don’t know how they do it, but each and every one, there’s a special… I can’t put words to it, but if they’re in a receiving line, and I’ve seen them all do it. They would spend a full day of work, come to an evening reception with 250 people, dead on their feet, and stand for two hours in a receiving line, shaking hands and taking pictures and smiling the same with the first person as the last person, knowing that they’ve gotten tired during that period of time, but greeting the first person and the last person with the same kind of energy. And it’s almost like when they shake hands, energy just transfers from the president and the first lady from the individuals that they’re greeting. It’s one of the most amazing phenomena I’ve ever seen.

And they’ve all been great to me. I mean, that’s nothing for them, that’s for me, that’s good for me, but it’s an unusual circumstance that I’ve had an opportunity to witness with all of them, and I guess that’s what allows them to go through these horrendous campaigns where they’re up for 16, 20 hours a day and traveling from place to place. You’ve got to get energy somewhere, and Bill Clinton didn’t get all of his energy from hamburgers, contrary to what people said. That was just a ridiculous comment. And former President Bush – Herbert Walker Bush – he didn’t eat pork rinds. There was this big story about him eating pork rinds. He never ate pork rinds! He got truckloads of pork rinds sent in for the president! He never ate pork rinds! It gets started on the campaign; you don’t know where these things come from. But he never ate pork rinds.

So there is that phenomenon, a transfer of energy, and they pick it up from people. They really do.

Yes sir?

Edison Dudoit: Most of America only sees these political figures on TV, they’ll get an impression through the media, but you seem to have a personal relationship with the president and all that. Is there a side of these people that you’ve noticed that you could inform us about?

Gary Walters: Not really. That’s one of the things I don’t do, is talk about their personal lives. I’ve had an opportunity to be beside them at some of the best and worst times in their lives; death of a parent; losing an election; wining an election. And I’ve had that – that’s kind of a unique opportunity that those of us in the residence – and I have more access than most, because I’m around them more than others, and I do have that ability.

I have talked before, the relationship that we build with the families is something that is difficult to describe. At the end of the last administration as President Clinton and Misses Clinton were leaving to go down to the capitol with this president in the motorcade that goes up to the capitol for the inaugural, the last person out the door was Chelsea Clinton, and she came to me and we hugged before she went away. And she said, “I’ll never forget what you’ve done, what you did for me.” …Didn’t do anything different for her I would have done for anybody else that lives here, but that was her impression of us, and I was the representative for the whole staff, not just me.

Susan Ford. Still talk to her from time to time. Just the other night the guest at the state dinner was Susan Eisenhower… Susan Nixon… Can’t get it out of me! …Susan Nixon… Not Susan… Why is this out of my mind? I don’t know what it is right now. President Nixon’s Daughter, who was married…

Sadanand Mailliard: Julie?

Gary Walters: Julie Eisenhower! I don’t know why I couldn’t get that out. I actually have two of the men who were on a part-time basis that worked for us at special events who were here when Julie was here in the Nixon administration growing up, obviously. And I had them come out and stand in the hall when Julie came out of the dining room that evening after the dinner was over. And you’d have thought this was a 50 year reunion. These two elderly gentlemen who are now both in their late 70′s, early 80′s, and Julie Nixon-Eisenhower walked out and David Eisenhower walked out of the state dining room and they embraced these two men. You can’t pay for that.

I was just thrilled that she had that opportunity and that they had that opportunity to reconnect with her. So there’s a personal bond that the staff gets with the family that’s hard not to develop over 4, 8 years.

Edison Dudoit: I guess I could specify the question to you.

Gary Walters: Yeah?

Edison Dudoit: Is there a side of people you see that may be misrepresented in the media?

Gary Walters: Oh yeah. You’re seeing the political side. You don’t get to see the family side, and that’s what we get to see all the time because we’re in their home. And we get to see the interaction between the president and the first lady, between president and children, the first lady and children, how they treat their friends and guests when they come in, so we get an opportunity to really get involved in the family’s life as opposed to the political side.

What you get an opportunity to see is what the president or the first lady want you to see, or what the press wants you to see of them. That’s why I said that first question was easy for me to answer – what’s the most enjoyable thing – is getting to know the family on a one-to-one basis without being through somebody else’s eyes. So yeah.

And there’s a lot of role-playing. Various presidents role-play really well. In front of the camera they’re one thing, and off the camera they’re another. I won’t tell you who those people are, but there’s a big difference. And I’m going to answer a question that everybody has in the back of their mind: who is the president I liked most; I will never answer that question.

Sadanand Mailliard: They know better than to ask that question.

Gary Walters: There will never be any nicer people than this president’s father and mother at the White House. There will be people as nice, but there will never be any nicer. And as they come back now with this president – with their son being in the White House – they go around and talk to everybody; the groundskeepers; the maids; everybody. They go through the staff – not just our staff, but the staff in the West Wing; people that have been here for a while. They know everybody. It’s a wonderful relationship, having an ability to be here long enough to see some of these things.

Yes ma’am?

Naomi Magid: So that interaction that you had with Chelsea Clinton, you’d say that you get really attached to the families that go through?

Gary Walters: Yeah. You can’t help it. We watched Chelsea go from a young girl to a young woman. From time to time, helped her with her homework if there was a question that came up in various things. Watched her sit with her father at breakfast and have him teach her certain things that dealt with schoolwork and hieroglyphics and various things. Watched as Misses Clinton, when Chelsea was six, soon after they moved in, go in to the kitchen herself and make soft boiled eggs so that she and Chelsea could have a few minutes together. We get involved in all those kinds of things. You can’t not be involved.

When the Carters were here, President and Misses Carter, they had two families here; their two sons lived here. In fact, their first month after they moved in to the White House, their son Chip – the second eldest son – and his wife Karen had a baby! Not born in the White House, but born in the local – but the baby grew up here; James Earl Carter III. Still talk to him today, from time to time. So you can’t help but get involved, and that’s the fun side of it. It really is.

Yes sir?

Luke Sanders-Self: Hi, I’m Luke. What do you think is the biggest surprise for the first family when moving in to the White House?

Gary Walters: The biggest surprise… The exposure. The lack of privacy. The fact that the White House is not as big as it looks on television. The camera – as you well know as a cameraman over there – has an ability to make things look bigger than they are. If you ever look at the East Room of the White House when they have these press conferences, it looks enormous. When you get up there today, you’ll see its 80 feet by 40 feet, roughly. That’s not that big. The state dining room, we put 130 people in thee for dinners; it’s not that big.

I think the fact that the family gets caught up in the campaigning, and when they come to the White House the campaign is over, but you can’t get away from that aspect because the press are right there in the West Wing. The president has got to walk past the press office to get to his office every day and every evening. Not that the press are allowed to be out there at that time, but he has to go right past them. I don’t know whether you’ve seen any of these motorcades when the president travels on television, there’s thirty cars almost that are involved, with the police and the escorts and the staff vans and the press vans and everything that goes on. You can’t go anywhere! President goes to ride his bike – this president goes to ride his bike – and there’s three Secret Service agents; one in front of him (if he can keep in front of him), one beside him and one behind him.

There’s very little privacy. A lot of that is more recently obviously driven by just security requirements that are out there, but that hasn’t really changed a great deal since the Kennedy administration when things tightened down since President Kennedy was assassinated. So I think that’s the biggest change that they have to go through, is the fact that even though they’re off the campaign trail, you don’t get away from the exposure.

Emily Crubaugh: Does your job description change a lot from administration to administration?

Gary Walters: No, not really. The White House stays the same size, thank goodness. It’s our responsibility to adapt to the president and the first lady and their wishes, and I think that’s a tribute to the staff in that we’ve had very few turnovers because of a change in administration. In the 36 years that I’ve been there, there have only been five people that have been asked to leave, of the staff that’s been here. And that’s been because of – most of them have been creative people. They’re the ones that are the most vulnerable, because they can’t translate what they do to what the new president or first lady would like done. In the kitchen from time to time, in the flower shop from time to time, but for the most part, we adapt well. And it’s our responsibility to adapt to them, not for them to adapt to us.

The staff has – the president’s staff – has a difficult time sometimes adapting to the White House after the election is over, because the White House isn’t this big expansive country. It’s really down to a smaller venue, and where you could have five or ten thousand people at a rally in Omaha, Nebraska, you’re looking at 300 for a reception at the White House and 98 people for a press conference. So the staff has more difficulty adapting to the White House. The families, we try and give them a home environment on the second and third floor, which is their primary residence area that they can go in to and feel comfortable in, so we try and adapt to them.

On inaugural day, it’s our responsibility to move one family out from the time they leave the White House, which is usually about 10:00 in the morning, the new family comes back in to the white house after the inaugural parade on Pennsylvania Avenue at about 5:00. And our intent is to have the family that’s moving out moved out, and the new family that’s coming in moved in to the point where there’s no boxes, that their clothes are hung in their closets, that furniture is exchanged the way they would like to see it arranged – which of course, we talk to them beforehand – that there are not people running around helter-skelter, so that when they come to their home, their new home, it is something that they are familiar with and something that they can move right in to.

Sadanand Mailliard: Gary, I just want to interject a question that occurred to me since we’ve been having this conversation for so many years. I’ve notice, I’ve been here early in administrations and I’ve been here in the middle and I’ve been at the end of administrations, and I notice that the people who come to work for your staff really grow in this job. They’re not the same people that leave as they are when they come. There’s something about being here that deepens and changes people, and I notice it. In the beginning there’s this kind of excitement of “we can take on the world,” and “we got elected,” and “we’ve got it all right,” and then I notice there’s kind of a growing humility and kindness that I see as people extend here longer. Can you say something about what this place does to the people who work here?

Gary Walters: It does so many different things to so many people. It is a humbling experience coming through the gate every day knowing that we’re involved in things that are taking place around the world. Certainly, there’s something afoot in the Middle-East right now. The president is meeting with the prime minister of Israel. There’s a new government in Iraq and two weeks from today or tomorrow, the new ambassador from that government is going to present his credentials to the president here at the White House. So there’s something afoot, and there’s always something afoot and I think that’s some of what you see; when the staffs come in initially, there is this initial excitement and “look, I’m involved, and all this is going on,” and then the reality hits: 12, 14 hour days, and things kind of tamp down a little bit.

And then the next side of reality hits, which is: “oh my god, I’m involved! This is something that will be in the history books, and I actually have an opportunity to get involved in it. It might be a little thing – I took a note to somebody who was going to then talk to the president – but I was there when that happened.” I think that’s part of what you see, is realization after the exhaustion – because the exhaustion never goes away – but the realization that you can get involved in something, and I think that’s what people do. And I’ve been here long enough to see people go away for ten years and come back in a different job.

Obviously, a government employee is not making a multi-million dollar salary. The president doesn’t! There are a lot of people making a whole lot more money than the president, so there has to be something that’s attune to what goes on at the White House and in government in general and the fact that government service is an important piece of that. I think there’s some realization; people come, people go, people come back. When they come back, they have a different grasp; they bring different experiences with them when they return. While they’re here, you’re brought so quickly from a juvenile status to a main-stage status that if you don’t grow, you get broken, and those are the people that leave.

After 9/11, there were some people here that physically could not take the mental anguish of being in a place that somebody else might possibly want to blow up. It was always in the back of somebody’s mind, but it actually happened with the Pentagon, possibly the other plane that was crashed in Pennsylvania was either aimed for the Capitol or the White House, and there were some people that – although they knew it in the back of their mind – that actual act broke some people down and they could not stay here any longer and they left.

Compressed in four years can be a long time – especially at your age but believe me, when you get older, it gets an awful lot shorter – but you get compressed. The information that you have, and especially being here, really gets compressed and you really have to digest that information quickly and move on. And it never stops. There’s always a new project, there’s always something new. You never know what’s going to happen the next day, and I think that’s one of the things that I admire about the presidents – you asked earlier about the presidents and how they react sometimes – the presidents don’t know what they’re going to get involved in.

Take a look at any president in recent history, what they look like on their inaugural day and what they look like after they left the White House. I guarantee you you’ll see a change, and it’s in the white or gray hair. And some of those men have only been here four years, and look at other people that have been someplace for four years, they don’t age like that. It’s an awesome responsibility that the president bears on his shoulders. I’ll be honest with you: I don’t know why anybody wants the job. You don’t get away from the responsibility. Forget what the press say about “the president goes on vacation,” and he’s just out there doing whatever he wants to do. If the presidents – any of them – get an hour to themselves in the course of the day, that’s a lot of time. And they never get away from the morning briefings, the afternoon briefings, the evening briefings, the reams of paper.

President Nixon. He was recognized as… of course, he was responsible for opening back up American policy with China, he was an expert on China, he was sent as an emissary actually by President Reagan to China, President Bush – Herbert Walker Bush – was the first ambassador to China, succeeding that. They… I forgot where I was going; now I got off to President Bush.

Sadanand Mailliard: You were talking about how much these guys… How much work they do, and how they study.

Gary Walters: Oh yeah. President Nixon in particular would come home at night literally to the residence, and he would bring a stack of folders – position papers – about… Have the valet carry them, and the valet would be carrying them and they’d be up almost to the top of his head And he’d go upstairs on the second floor and he’d put the stack of papers down by him, these valises and folders and binders, and he became an expert on China not by absorbing it by what other people said, he read. Voraciously read all these papers. And as I said earlier, we were talking briefly about where do you get your information; multiple sources. The president read, and he did not become an expert on China by listening to his advisors in the State Department telling him what it’s about. He read and read and read and took all that in to account, and then made his decisions based on that.

So… I hope that answered your question.

Sadanand Mailliard: Yeah, it did.

Casey Lightner: Hi.

Gary Walters: Yeah?

Casey Lightner: You talked a little bit about how other people felt on 9/11, but I was curious how you dealt with 9/11 and how you felt on that day.

Gary Walters: Wow. That was a quite emotional day. What some people don’t realize on that day is we were having a congressional picnic that night. Had the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania – had this occurred in the evening instead of in the morning, the entire United States Congress, the entire executive branch – president, vice president, cabinet – would have been on the south grounds of the White House that night, 5:00. So we were all set up. We had tables and it was going to be kind of a chuck-board barbeque that we were doing outside. We had chuck-wagons and tables set up and picnic tables, about 160 picnic tables on the south ground, a big stage off to the side and everything. And I was in the process of setting that up and getting ready for that evening’s activities when I got the first word of the first plane going in to the World Trade Center in New York, and subsequently the second one. At that point, I realized that we were under attack.

Didn’t take me long to make some decisions that I had to make. I knew the president was down in Florida. I don’t know if you remember that or not, but he was down in Florida speaking to a group of children in a school when this occurred. I had a whole series of things that I had to do, but the first thing that came to my mind was the president’s coming back to the White House and I’ve got to get stuff cleaned off of the south grounds, because they don’t want to land on the south grounds.

Well, the picnic tables we have weigh about 350 pounds each. And there are 150 of them out there. As I walked out of the south portico once I’d gotten my thoughts together and gotten people together, which took about five minutes to get people in place to start moving stuff, as I walked out of the south portico, I saw the fireball in the Pentagon above the trees, because you can’t see the Pentagon from the south portico of the White House, but I saw the fireball.

At that point, the police started telling people to get out. I don’t know whether you saw those pictures or not, but you saw the police telling everybody to run and everybody was running towards Pennsylvania Avenue in the north. And I’m screaming to tell people to run south, because if a plane was going to come in to the White House it’s going to come in to the largest surface, which is the south side of the building, and any debris is going to go north. So I’m trying to tell people to go south, instead of going north.

I was able to keep about six people with me, and we stood on the south grounds on the knoll out here for eight hours. And as time allowed with the assistance of the police officers, we were able to move all those picnic tables by hand. That night the president landed, if you ever get a chance to look at that again, when the president walks to the office, you’ll see a bunch of picnic tables stacked three high as the president walks past them going back to the Oval Office, because we stayed here as staff and cleaned off the grounds so the president could make that speech that night from the Oval Office when he returned to the White House.

So those are the kinds of things that awe get involved in, and that was quite an emotional day. I ended up spending three days here, because at that point, none of us knew what was going to occur. Intervening days.

Sir?

John-Nuri Vissell: It’s amazing how you could unite and organize in such a time of peril. I was wondering if maybe some of the best works and some of the most united and coordinated action happens in some of our country’s darkest times.

Gary Walters: I think if you have the proper thought processes, that people are thinking about how things fit together, nobody could have – and nobody did, obviously – think about the tragic nature of 9/11, but there were natural fallouts that went from that; things that went, some planning, strategic planning. Obviously the vice president, secretary of state, national security advisor were taken to certain areas where they were protected, and the president, they put him up in an aircraft, flew around for a while before they decided where to go. So there were some contingency plans, they weren’t specific to that incident, but they were some specific plans.

I think that people who – and I’m not talking about myself in this case – there are people that are in place for a reason, because they have that ability to do strategic planning on the fly. That’s why we have, you know, some of our greatest thinkers are in the military. They’re wonderful people that are able to react in times of crisis. We’ve seen the presidents who have done unbelievable things in times of crisis. So I think that it’s some thought process that people go through beforehand. You have some idea of what considerations… Do you play baseball?

John-Nuri Vissell: No. I play volleyball.

Gary Walters: Volleyball? Same thing: anticipation. What direction is the ball going to be struck? Where do I want to hit it next? That usually is running through your mind very quickly in the course of when somebody else is getting ready to hit the ball to you. You know, you’re already thinking about how can I get to the spot that I want to get to, to return this ball or to set it up for the man on the front line, or is there an open space in the back; it’s incredible what our mind can do in such a short period of time.

I don’t know whether any of you have been in a car accident or had a serious accident. Can you think about the span of time and what went through your mind in that span of time? It’s like… It happens in a millisecond, but the thoughts that go through your mind; where’s my family? Do I need to put my arm out? Do I need to duck? I mean, it’s amazing what your mind can do in that fraction of a second leading up to something like that, and I think there’s some people that have an ability to do that on the fly, and we’re lucky in this country to have a lot of them in places where they need to be.

John-Nuri Vissell: Thank you.

Alyssa DeBenedetti: My name is Alyssa. Our closer for the interview, we ask the same question to everyone, and it is: what is the most important piece of advice you can give for our generation?

Gary Walters: Get involved. And stay involved. Getting involved and dropping something is not the same as getting involved and staying involved. It is like I was saying earlier: whatever you’re going to get involved in, do it to the best of your ability, try to make the best of it. And if you don’t like it, move on. But when you get involved in something, you usually are going to get involved in it because you enjoy it. And stick with it and do things that give you some pleasure, because that will give you more incentive to stay with it. You can’t live life and not be involved. If you’re not involved in something, you’re just kind of play acting. So you need to be in a circumstance where you could enjoy yourselves while you’re doing something that’s productive. I mean, sitting under a tree and looking at the leaves is great, but you can only do that so long. Now, maybe you want to prune the tree, or see what kind of fruit is on the three, there are a lot of things that you can do, but involvement… You can’t beat involvement; and long-time involvement.

I think a lot of people that talk to people who have made a career out of helping other people – you know, people that work for the Red Cross and various… – they do it because they like what they are doing. They don’t do it because it’s a civic duty in most cases, they really like what they’re doing.

Sadanand Mailliard: Gary, clearly you’re in a service position; if there ever was one, this is service. And I know that inevitably, you’ve made sacrifices. I remember one year when we came and your daughter was applying for college, I remember you asked the kids…

Gary Walters: It scared me to death!

Sadanand Mailliard: I know. You made the mistake of asking us for some advice, and they said “don’t worry, if she doesn’t like the college she’s in, she can pick another one.” We teach our kids to be adaptable, you know. But do you really see it as a net sacrifice or do you see it as a net gain, all that you’ve contributed?

Gary Walters: For me? Personally, it’s been a tremendous opportunity for me. I can’t tell you the amount of history that I’ve had an opportunity to be involved in. Not witness, but literally be involved in. A little corner over here someplace, but at least I was involved. Some decisions that I have made that have affected a lot of things that go on around here. Some of them deal with making the president and their family happy.

President 41, I’ll refer to him as this president’s father, when they had their 50th wedding anniversary and invited the military band – just a couple of members – to play a favorite song of theirs and invited them downstairs under the pretense of needing to look at something in the East Room, and they came down the steps and I was able to have six members of the orchestra there to play a favorite song of theirs. Little things like that, bringing happiness to other people.

For me? I think my family’s probably the ones that have taken the greatest hit. I have a daughter and a wife obviously who have spent time at home wondering what I’m doing, sometimes not being able to get a hold of me or not seeing me for a few days at a time. So I think that if I had a regret, that’s it. I didn’t have as much time, although I made time. I took time. My daughter was in gymnastics, so I made sure that I went on Saturday and spent six hours sitting in the bleachers while she performed for 35 seconds, but those are the things you have to do at times.

So it’s a sacrifice, a family sacrifice, but I’ve had an opportunity to make the families that live here, hopefully, their lives a little bit better. Protected their privacy and had an opportunity as I said to see a lot of history, so it’s not something I’d trade.

Sadanand Mailliard: What college did your daughter go to?

Gary Walters: Boston College. Great school. Even though they did have some problems this past couple of days with secretary Rice up there.

Sadanand Mailliard: She graduated?

Gary Walters: Yeah. She graduated with honors, made the decision to go to that school based on the fact that she wanted to be involved in the academic program that they had as well as she was in gymnastics from the time she was three years old. They didn’t have a gymnastics program so she got involved in cheerleading at Boston College, and was the head of the cheerleading squad for three years and for two years also a cheerleader for the Boston Celtics, because they didn’t have the group of ladies on the court that danced. She liked the acrobatics of being thrown in the air and being caught. I like the caught part, myself. I thought that was an important part of the operation.

So she’s doing wonderful, thank you for asking. But it’s a sacrifice. If you ask them, I think they’d understand what I’ve done, and they’ve had the benefits of being at the White House. We have a picture – my daughter does – of every year of her life, being with the president at Christmas time and having a photograph. So from the time she was a babe in arms until this past Christmas, having a photograph of her with the President of the United States at Christmas time. So there are benefits that go along with it, but hardships too.

All: Thank you.

Ray Suarez: One of the smarter guys in Washington, Robert Zoellick.

Sadanand Maillard: We saw that cut of the two of you, that was a good interview. How’d you feel about that conversation?

Ray Suarez: Well, there’s always a feeling that they know far more then they’re telling you, so you can never push yourself away from the desk thinking, “Got that one.” This is one of the most closed-mouthed, secretive, and protective of information administrations in history. So, you never feel when interview anyone from the Bush administration that they’ve told you, alright, them telling you everything they know is more then you could hope for, but even everything you should know or could know. It’s a bit of a frustration.

Sadanand Maillard: What I noticed about that interview was that he reminds me of Pickering??? in the way he talks, kind of around the subject. In stuff I’ve read of his where he’s met with the press in other countries, there are a lot of words and not a lot of information. What I noticed in the interview with you was that he was much more direct then I usually see him. So how do you prep for that?

Ray Suarez: Hopefully that’s a function of the questions you ask. You can’t come into the office in the morning knowing nothing about Darfur, and be ready in the evening to do that. Theoretically, you’ve been following Darfur all along, so that when it finally crosses your plate, you’re not ready, but ready to get ready, you know. You just hop up your tank, rather then trying to fill it from scratch. I had a radio documentary on the air yesterday about Darfur, its something that I’ve been following a fair bit.

Kendra Froshman: So do you spend everyday catching up on news, to make sure you’re always ready for what happens?

Ray Suarez: You’re always tracking twenty, or so stories that there’s a reasonable expectation of going to cross your desk at some point, so that you’re never starting from scratch, you should never be starting from scratch. Well, sometimes, obviously. In a world as multi-faceted as this one there’s going to be something you missed. But then you start out way ahead of the audience, anyway. You just have to get ready enough to do your work at the end of the day.

Sadanand Maillard: That’s like the lawyer joke about the two lawyers that meet the mountain lion. One of them is dropping his pack to run, and the guy says, “You can’t outrun a mountain lion.” He says, “I don’t have to, I just have to outrun you.” Like that right, you have to stay one foot ahead.

Ray Suarez: I mean we’re trying to bring the public along, too. So it’s more like putting the bit in your mouth and pulling the public over the next hill.

Casey Lightner: Hi, I’m Casey.  I was wondering, what’s your basic mission as a correspondent?

Ray Suarez: The basic mission is to take part in a collaborative effort, because everything in this business is collaborative. And produce a program that gives members of the public the tools they need to be a citizen. Give them day, after day, after day, a reasonable view of the world that leaves them at the end of that process, with a handle on what happened that day that they should know about. Some days that may mean taking a very high profile role and anchoring the program, some days it may mean doing something a lot less apparent and a lot less obvious contribution to the program. Really, you’re putting your whole experience to work, and becoming part of that daily project.

When you do something like produce a daily news program, you really start from scratch every morning. It’s like working in a bakery. So, the News Hour is unusual in that it’s both more hierarchical and less hierarchical then other programs that resemble it. I’m one of the highest paid utility infielders in news. I go in most days not knowing exactly what I’m doing to be doing, but doing whatever is needed.

Mark Hansen: Hi, my name is Mark. With a Bachelor’s in African History and a Master’s in Social Science, journalism was not a forgone conclusion. When did you know that this was the path for you?

Ray Suarez: I guess I really made up my mind around fifteen. I really knew that I wanted to be a reporter; I wasn’t convinced that it would be one kind or another. I put together a set of preparatory experiences would have gotten me ready for various parts of the news business, it wasn’t that important to me at that time which one I ended up in.

I worked for my high school news paper, I worked for my college news paper, I worked for my college radio station, one year serving as news director, one year serving as program director, and in my senior year I was an editor of my college news paper. I chose African History because Africa, at that point, was going to be the scene of some of the final chapters in the Cold War. When I started college there were three very hot civil wars going on in Africa, and there were Soviet and American Proxies on the ground in countries all over the place.

I just was fascinated by Africa, but backed the wrong horse. It was really Central America that got the American news business, and no one would send me to Africa. No one would employ me in Africa. I was doing that because I thought this would be a career making, fascinating place to be working, so I got ready to go there, and then the American news business was totally, utterly uninterested in Africa. Africa did end up being a great story through the 80′s and 90′s, but my career by then had taken other turns. I did get to do reporting trips in Africa from time to time, and I’m sure I’ll do others. So, there’s no such thing as waste inventory. There’s nothing that you learn that’s totally a waste of time, especially in the news business where everything you learn comes up again. You just don’t now when.

John-Nuri Vissell: So, you prepared for any career that might present itself. Are you ever surprised at where you ended up today?

Ray Suarez: Totally surprised. I never intended to, or wanted to live in Washington. I never intended, or particularly set my sights on working at the News Hour. A career in the news business is often the result of a series of accidents. It would have been impossible for me to plan a career path like the one that ended up rolling out in front of me.

I ended up working in television, which is something I never intended to do. I really love radio, I think that’s my first love, but I’m very happy in television. I just happened to hit a brick wall at one point in radio, and the opportunity to work in television presented itself so I just took it. That training led to other jobs that I never intended to work in, either. So, if you meet somebody who’s eighteen who says they’ve got their life all planned out, take them aside and tell them they’ve no idea what they’re talking about. And if they plan a career in the news business and tell you they’ve got it all planned out, tell them they’re nuts.

Andrea Schmitt: Hi, I’m Andrea. Did you have any mentors or inspirational figures in your life that have helped you along the way?

Ray Suarez: I wish I did. I could’ve used them, and it would have been nice. To be a Puerto Rican guy from Brooklyn, trying to make it in the national news business in the 80′s and 90′s and 00′s, there really was no one to mentor you, you were fighting the business the whole way. I grew up in New York City, at a time where there were two million Latinos in the city, and none in the news rooms. It’s a disgrace, and when I became a producer for the ABC radio network, I was the first staff producer, first Latino staff producer at the biggest radio network in the country.

And that was 1982. No way should it have gotten all the way to 1982 without them being able to find anybody, from coast to coast. It’s ridiculous. They were eventually sued, settled out of court for millions, in a failure to hire and promote suit that was brought by black and Latin employees. I was the first Latino staff correspondent at CNN, I was the first Latino street reporter for the NBC O and O in Chicago, and the first Latino host of a daily news show at NPR. And, I don’t say that with any particular amount of pride. I say it with almost a sense of shock, that I could have been the first of any of those things, coming along as late in the game as I did.

Sometimes it was out and out racism; sometimes it was just cluelessness. But whatever made it happen that was the shape of the business though much of the time I was coming up in it. Things are significantly better now, and they get better all the time. But, you found yourself constantly trying to breach walls that were erected to keep people out of places. And, I never had a sense that I was being welcomed, cultivated, brought along, prepared for bigger jobs down the road, and all of that. It’s been more of a thirty year street scrap, with no rules. This month, May, is my thirtieth anniversary in the business. This week I started my first paid job in the news, thirty years ago.

It really is nice to see, I go once a year to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Convention, and I meet young people who are being located, cultivated, brought along, identified early in their careers, moved into smaller properties in large diversified media companies, to be trained and risen within the company. That’s one of the fundamental changes since I was first getting started. So, it’s great to have a mentor, its great to have somebody who’s got your back, maybe someday I’ll find one.

Seychelle deVries: I’m Seychelle. You have a reputation for being very good at getting people to open up. We talked about it a little earlier, but I was wondering if you maybe focus a little more on how you come into an interview and get the best out of it, on a more of a person to person level.

Ray Suarez: There are many reporters who, for their own reasons, and in their own way, want to give you the impression that they’re tough. And the reason they’re entering this encounter, and really an interview is an encounter, is that they are going to be you, or trick you, or trip you, or punch you, or something. In figurative terms. I’ve found, through my career, that if the first affect you present to your interview subject, in this encounter, is that you are well prepared, and ready to do business, and not looking to embarrass them, your able to cut through the preliminary nonsense. You’re able to avoid having to chase them around the desk. You waste less time. So, it often puts somebody at their ease to betray some knowledge of their subject. It often makes them realize, very close to the top, that they’re not going to be able to fob you off with their boiler plate, half revealing, quarter revealing answers. Which is just a trick of an interview subject to make you ask four questions instead of one, when they both know, you know, they know you’ve only got nine minutes.

It’s a very discipline doing it live into a finite window on the News Hour, from doing an interview when you’re preparing for a magazine article, or a newspaper article, or an edited radio piece where you’re going to do interviews and then take small bits of it to include in your story. Then, if you’re doing a piece that’s edited, you can really spend time laying the foundation, narrowing your focus of your questions, pressing them when they don’t answer you. The task and the tricks of the trade are just different when you’re doing it live, into an already known to be finite window. The person you’re interviewing know its finite, you know its finite, and you can’t waste a lot of time on preliminary nonsense. So, I find that putting people at their ease, and also giving them the distinct impression that you know what you’re talking about, works as a gambit far better then, “I’m gonna get you,” which works for some people, but they are more in show business than I am. I’m in the news business. I’d rather get the person to tell me about the news then beat them. Whatever that means.

Megan Mitchell: Hi, I’m Megan. In journalism it is crucial to get your story, but is there a line between getting your story and respecting people’s privacy? And, if so, where is that line, and when is it ok to cross it?

Ray Suarez: This is something that you encounter much more in local news, and much less at working in Washington with national affairs and foreign affairs. But, I’ve certainly enough times in my life come against it. Unfortunately, in unfortunate ways, the business has changed its conception of where the line is and what it means to cross it, and whether it’s in their interest to cross it. I don’t care that much about the private lives of public people, unless in the course of that private life they are breaking the law, or misrepresenting themselves. If they’re just carrying on a private life that they intend to keep private, and isn’t hurting anybody, then who cares, really. I know that they’ll probably come and confiscate my news guy card at the end of this.

I really just don’t care, yet I know that if public figures in Washington turn out to be leading lives in their private realm that are less then admirable, there are plenty of my peers in the business who think that it’s a tremendous story and worthy of play on the front page. So, its gets out one way or another, I guess. When people are involved in an event, over which they had no agency, no control, were not involved in making or shaping an even, but were accidental participants in circumstance. I think their privacy rights are more sacred then somebody who knowingly enters the public realm to do their business, do their work.

I used to fight with my editors and producers a lot when somebody was the victim of a crime, or involved in an accident, and the news business was trying to suck their families into the vortex of their storytelling, in a way that victimized them, made them sort of pathetic, sad, creatures on public display. I wasn’t sure what that enlightened, who it informed, and to what end. So I always tried to avoid it. It also makes you feel pretty shabby, frankly, when you’re the person knocking at the door to get somebody to make a statement about the killing of their son or daughter, what the hell are they going to say. And to what end, what is the public going to know about their grief, about their sort of crushed horizons and the loss of somebody that they loved, that will inform the public about something that they wouldn’t have known about otherwise, or need to know to carry on their lives. Arguably, nothing.

Once a guy, a young guy, who was going to Indiana University in Indianapolis, from Chicago, he was a student down there, and worked nights delivering pizzas. He got murdered delivering a pizza in Indianapolis, and my producers sent me to the family home in the Chicago Suburbs, to get them to say something. And I fought all the way out there over the radio, because I said it was stupid and I didn’t want to do it, and what was the point. The crime didn’t even happen in Chicago, so it doesn’t tell our viewers anything about life in Chicago, which would tell them anything they needed to know, and it would just exploit this family’s grief to make television out of it.

But they threatened me with suspension if I didn’t do it, so I went to the door, and knocked on the door, and a man who had clearly been crying came to the front door and started yelling at me. I thought, “You know, sir,” I didn’t say this to him, “You should yell at me. This is totally stupid.” I said I was sorry and closed the door, and I left him alone. I always remember that because we, in the business, often assume that anything that happens to, with, or around a person, is fair game for us, whether it makes a story that means anything to people, or not. The business could be a little humane, a little more often, I think.

Jonji Barber: Hi, I’m Jonji. I was wondering if you ever regretted making a news cast, and if so, which one and why?

Ray Suarez: From time to time, because of the speed with speed with which we sometimes prepare things. You don’t get it a 100% right. You get it right in the realm of known facts at the moment you go on the air, but six hours later, twelve hours later, eighteen hours later, what you’ve said turns out to be wrong. I hate that, it just bugs me to have said anything that turns out not to be a 100% true into an open microphone. Of course, Suarez’s Law of Microphone Physics is that the more words you say into open microphones, the higher percentage that anything you say is going to be wrong eventually. I mean you just can’t, the more you’re on, you just can’t be right all the time. And the more you say; eventually you’re going to say something wrong. It is the thing, I hope, that bugs journalists more then anything else.

Are there specific and particular things? No, not big stuff. Occasionally when you’re writing the first draft about public knowledge of an event, or an issue, there are things that just can’t be known to you yet, and you sometimes get it wrong. The News Hour is very good about correcting things, even though that’s not one of our proudest moments, we do what’s called editor’s note at the end of the broadcast, and you won’t see other nightly news programs doing that. We correct even the smallest details, remind people that Tuesday night we did a story on XYZ, and we said this, and actually its that, sorry. It keeps us honest, because the terror of having to do that, no one wants to go back on television and say, “Remember that story I did Tuesday, well I was wrong. So it makes you even that more intent on being correct.

Naomi Magid: Hi, I’m Naomi. You spoke a minute ago about a story that had special meaning for you, are there any other stories that stand out for you?

Ray Suarez: Yeah, there are, tons of them, and for all different reasons. When the apartheid regime fell in South Africa through the ballot box rather then through a civil war, it was a great event in human history. All the seeds had been sown for a terrible, destructive, horrifying conflict in South Africa. But, everybody thought for a second before they did, and they didn’t do it. It was a great thing. After that first election, I sat in a very nice backyard garden in Johannesburg with a guy named Joe Slovo. Joe Slovo was the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party. He was a banned person, he was jailed, hunted, targeted, for much of his adult life and spent much of his adult life in exile. And while I personally had very little sympathy for his communist leanings, I certainly had tremendous sympathy for someone who was willing to give up so much of their lives to an idea and an ideal, to fight against an oppressive government. It wasn’t just being in exile, the South African secret police, for instance murdered his wife, who was also an activist. When they were living, what they thought, in a secret location in Angola his wife got into her car, turned the key in the ignition, and was blown to smithereens.

Joe Slovo was in his mid 70′s at the point when I met him, had every reason to be filled with bitterness and regret, about how his life had gone, and yet there we were. The birds were twittering in the branches, the flowers were out, and he was a man at peace ready make a government with people who had hunted him for his whole life. Totally uninterested in score settling, totally uninterested in retribution, in trying or jailing the people who had done the things to him that they had done. You come away very rarely from an interview sort of stunned by the greatness of spirit, the bigness of heart, which it takes to be somebody. That was one of those moments where you really realize it. Joe Slovo after living in hiding, and going to prison, and having members of his family targeted and killed, became the first minister of housing in the first post-apartheid South African government. Interesting guy.

When I interviewed Margaret Thatcher shortly after her time as Prime Minister, it was a much less genial time that I spent with her. But at the same time incredibly impressive because you understood immediately, I worked in Britain as a reporter in the early years of her time as Prime Minister, and walking away from the mic after an hour I totally got how she had been able to do what she did, and at the same time thought, “God, what a terrible person.” So, the public person and their use, their necessity to history, what possible difference could it make whether I would like Margaret Thatcher or not, or want to chummy with her, or have a drink with her.

I understood immediately after spending that time with her how people can come along and history makes them, and they make history at the same time. It’s a symbiotic relationship, its not just the times that make the person, its both happening at the same time. She was a particular mix of traits, and attributes, and beliefs that spoke to a country that had a particular and peculiar history up until that moment, and was ready for her to come along. So she took a decaying, sclerotic, country, which had been a wealthy one, and had made it poor, or poorer, over the previous two generations. She took it by its collar and shook it with a frantic energy, and set the table for Britain to become a wealthier, different place in the next decades after she was Prime Minister. Tony Blair is only possible because of Margaret Thatcher, and I would probably bug both conservatives and labor supporters by saying, but they, in longitudinal and historical terms, they created each other. It’s only a richer Britain that can elect Tony Blair, and its only one that had been undone the way Britain had been that could elect a Margaret Thatcher. So, history fits, its makes sense.

When I was in South Africa I met a woman named Rebecca, who was an entrepreneur. To be a black woman entrepreneur in South Africa is not always the easiest road. She rented a shipping container, those big rectangular metal boxes that move everything around the world, and she opened a store in a shipping container. She sold sheep parts everyday. She would go before the sun was up, buy from a middleman, bring the sheep parts in a Styrofoam insulated container, and sell them, and then when she ran out of stock for the day she would close the store. I asked her, “Gee, if you could get more sheep parts everyday, could you sell more?” She said, “Oh, absolutely! But the problem is, I can’t get more because I can’t get a refrigerator. I can’t get a refrigerator because I can’t get credit, and I can’t get credit because I have no credit history, and I have no collateral. When I walk into a bank and I say I would like to borrow three hundred dollars to buy a freezer, they tell me that its impossible to lend me any money because I have nothing to show incase I default on the loan.

Here was the predicament of her country written large. There was a developed world economy sitting side by side, and rubbing up against a developing world economy, everyday. She had to play by this set of rules that were totally irrelevant to her existence. Collateral? The woman woke up in a village every morning and walked several miles to that shipping container. She didn’t get in her SUV, drop her kids off at school, and head to her sheep parts distributor business. She was making it up as she went along but she could be richer, she could be richer and then, in turn, spending more money in her town. But it was for the lack of these three hundred dollars. It was one of those things, a “wah lah!” moment where everything becomes immediately apparent when she explains herself.

There were hundreds of thousands of Rebecca’s, scattered all across Southern Africa. I put this story on the radio, and an appliance salesman in Pretoria called. A white guy, who told me he had been listening to the radio, and heard the story, and as long as Rebecca had electricity, she was going to have a freezer. Because NPR was broadcasting its series of programs on South Africa in South Africa, he had been able to hear it driving in his car, and Rebecca, one person, was able to leap the hurdle that was in fact locking up all her potential. She was like a match that was covered in a fireproof container. She couldn’t be struck, and start really going with a business. She was smart, she was capable, she was strong, she was willing work long hours, but here was this little, ridiculous, barrier to her being able to support her family better and also pull the whole neighborhood up along with her. It’s nice when you get to explain to your viewers, listeners, readers, something that really is literally, metaphorical. I mean a metaphor is something that carries meaning; it’s a vessel that carries meaning. Rebecca’s story was able to explain the whole dynamic of what was locking up South Africa for the people who were trying to get ahead there.

Todd Wilson: In your book about suburban migration, you talk how the younger class moved out of what you called the “old neighborhood,” to a place where they could choose their neighbors, and how this eroded the whole “great melting pot” that was America. I was wondering what really drove you to research this topic and explore it as much as you did.

Ray Suarez: Well, I worked as a reporter in New York, London, Rome, Los Angeles, and Chicago. And, along the way, covered a lot of urban government, watched a lot of neighborhood re-segregation, and all the things that accompany it, and gradually got obsessively interested in cities and how they work. When Simon and Schuster asked me what I wanted to write about, I said cities, and they said great, so I wrote the book. It is an obsession, but a good obsession, a moneymaking obsession.

Daniel Nanas: It’s been said that often we know what we’re getting rid of but we forget what we’re losing. In the suburban migration and the upward movement of convenient and comfortable living in the suburbs, do you think we’ve lost something that is essentially American?

Ray Suarez: Well, by losing something that’s essentially American we also gained something and created something that’s essentially American too. Right now if you go to the outskirts of Prague, or Moscow, you don’t see architectural models based on seven hundred years of Russian history, or a thousand years of bohemian history being built outside Prague and Moscow. Its something based on fifty years of American history, because they’re building American-style suburbs with cul-de-sacs, streets that don’t meet at right angles, house that don’t face each other, residential only places with no commercial space, no sidewalks. You’re building the world model is becoming the American model, so don’t forget that we did that, too. Part of the reason that we forget what we’ve lost is because we want to justify shedding it, sloughing it off, losing it. So, we put it away and then either forget we ever had it, which is one way of making it make sense to ourselves, or denigrate it. Or, frequently, rhapsodize about it but also put it beyond reach.

So, when I interviewed a lot of people who had been in the first wave of getting out of the cities, they talk about how wonderful it was, and the great things that loved about the old, intact, densely built urban neighborhood, and then they end their story by saying, “Oh, but we could never live like that now.” Justifying it to themselves, and also imagining that millions of people are still living like that today, exactly the life they had described, in the places they had left behind. One of the things that make it easy to do that is that the people themselves have changed. So, Brownsville in Brooklyn, Bushwick which were working class Jewish neighborhoods fifty years ago, sixty years ago now, are now largely Puerto Rican and west-Indian neighborhoods. They think, “Oh, we could never live like that now,” not paying attention to the fact that the Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans who are living in the same apartment buildings are living just the way those people who rhapsodize about old Bushwick, are describing.

Some of that is human nature, some of it’s a way of justifying to yourself what you did, there’s no need to apologize for it. When we got richer as a country people just made different choices about how they wanted to live. What happened, happened, but you tell people still feel a little conflicted about it, because they traded that life in for something else that they weren’t sure they were getting into, and it hasn’t always be a very satisfying life. Those new style, newer style suburban subdivisions are very difficult places to get old, and be old. Now, as we’re on the verge of a real crashing demographic wave with seventy million people going to turn sixty in the next coming years, they’re going to discover the places they thought were their dreamscape for living are actually quite difficult places to be old.

Kristin Vant’Rood: From the government leaders we’ve talked to in the past few days we’ve seen kind of the behind-the-scenes view of government that the public doesn’t normally see. Is there a behind the scenes view of the news business, also, and is there something that we should understand about the news business that public never gets to see?

Ray Suarez: We work very hard to create the illusion that it’s easy, so it looks effortless, and it happens, but in fact we work very hard to make it look like it wasn’t hard. Also, we created illusion of having it all licked, and in fact the news business is the immediate art of the possible. You don’t put on the ideal story; because the ideal story takes more time then it’s really ever possible to devote to it. So we do what we can, when we have to, rather then the best possible when we get to it. That’s the tension, really in the news business, some people get it out of their system, some people are frustrated by it constantly, some people think that if they write books, like my new book is coming out Labor Day weekend, you think, “Oh well because it’s a long term project, and because its two hundred pages, you’ll actually have the time, but in fact a book is the art of the possible, too. It’s just the longer form of telling the story, and takes you much more in the way of grief and sweat to accomplish, but there are all kinds of surrenders in that, too.

If I waited to bring out this book until it was ideal, and everything was exactly right, and it was just what I wanted it to be, it would come out after anybody was interested in reading it. So, it operates as a piece of created intellectual property that isn’t all that different in some ways from a story that’s on the nightly news, tonight. It’s that art of the possible that really is the thing that people don’t know about us; it’s our nasty little secret. We do as well as we can, by when we have to. When the lights go on at six o’clock we have to present fifty four minutes of inventory, and it has to be as good as we can get it by six o’clock. And that’s our dirty little secret.

Seychelle deVries: Can you tell us a little about the book that you wrote?

Ray Suarez: Yeah, it’s about the way religion has become more publicly entwined with the way we do politics over the last twenty five years. The great thing about it is that it turned out way differently from the way I intended it to, and that means I really paid attention and stayed open to the way the story changed over time, instead of just writing what I went in intending to write. The project of talking to people, and reading court cases, traveling, didn’t just confirm the stances of an already made up mind. So, it constantly morphed as I found out more things. It’s going to annoy religious people and secular people, its going to annoy people who think politics should be more entwined with American religion, and its going to annoy people who don’t think it should be in there at all. I’m pleased by the way it’s going.

Nina Castanon: Hi, I’m Nina. Philosopher Jacob Needleman said, “We don’t suffer from our questions, we suffer from our answers. Most of the mischief in the world is caused by the people with answers, not from the people with questions.” As a professional question-asker, how would you respond to this?

Ray Suarez: You would not believe how many times people get mad at reporters because of the questions they ask, rather then the apparent inability or unwillingness to answer the question on the part of the interview subject. As if we are to blame for the situation that we’re asking questions about. So, Americans are very sensitive, so that process and Americans also carry a sort of personal, rough and ready appropriateness guide. They are offended by some questions, made angry by some questions, mad at the press, and yet they should be, they really should be demanding much better answers. And they’re not. When you watch the daily briefing at the White House press room, with the press secretary, there are days when they give answers they should be ashamed to give in public, they’re not, they know if they dodge and weave and avoid the public will eventually be mad at us for hectoring and asking, rather then mad at them for lying.

When the president steps before the microphones, and this is a all-partisan statement, its not just the current president its all presidents, for reasons that adhere to them and their personal fortunes as politicians, rather then the fortune of the state, as an ongoing enterprise, they lie and they dodge, and they avoid. I have very little interest in their personal success, their personal approval ratings, how their feel, whether they’re embarrassed or not, and I have a lot of interest in the fate of the country. So, I am quite often frustrated with them for the lies that they tell in service of their own faiths, rather then in service of protecting or the future prosperity and peace of the country. Its too bad, but lying to reporters has become just dead easy, in part because there are fewer reporters, given the amount of inventory there is to be produced, so we have very little time to check all the answers, we have very little time to run things down to earth, to find out, quickly, whether they are lying. They know they can get away with a lie for longer and longer, and by the time you find out they were lying, nobody wants to hear the story anymore. If three weeks after a news conference you realize that president X was lying, you run into your editor and say, “Remember that news conference he gave back in May, he was lying!” Who cares? Nobody cares. Policy makers at all levels realize they can get away with lying to the press for longer and longer periods of time. Who’s next?

Emily Crubaugh: I was wondering if you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be, and why?

Ray Suarez: Probably Nelson Mandela, because he’s probably not going to around forever; he’s ill. And I think there are just some great things to pick his brain about before he goes.

Ian Rusconi: We’re wondering, what is the most important piece of advice that you have for our generation?

Ray Suarez: Well, I have two high school children, and the advice that I give them is that they never have to be bored. And I tell them not to be bored. You know, a certain amount of frustrating dead time happens in every life, but really, if it goes on for too long, you’re just not trying hard enough. You have the minds, I hope you have the curiosity, to create the circumstances where you’ll never be bored. You should be constantly learning things, and as I alluded to earlier, there’s no such thing as something you learn that is a total waste. Learning creates its own value, and you may not know when it will come in handy, or what the next thing you learn will stand on, what foundation it will stand on, but really be voracious that way and constantly feed your head, your head needs a lot of feeding. It will make you more interesting, it will make you more exciting for others to be around. It will make you more curious just by the very act of learning new things, because that’s a sort of self sustaining cycle. By being interested, you become more interested, and more interesting at the same time. That’s my advice to your generation.

Author

Mount Madonna, Dec 2001 and 2002

Sobonfu: Well, it’s a pleasure for me to be here today. It always delights me to be able to get to meet young people because it’s not always that you can actually talk to the young people down the street and so being able to come to a school always opens up a wide range of possibilities.

I come from Burkina-Faso, which means “the land of the proud ancestors.”  I come from a tribe called the Dagara tribe. The Dagara are people who live in community. Their life is based on spirit and their greatest wealth is the people that they have in their lives. They get up in the morning thinking about spirit. They go to bed thinking about spiritual things. The day is made sacred. In other words, you have to welcome your own spirit and have the spirits out there welcome you as they welcome everybody else’s spirit. That is very important because without the continuous tuning of the spirit, of the self, it is very difficult to remain in balance within the community, and also for you to keep connected to other people.

When I was growing up there wasn’t school in the village, so you were taught by everybody around you. Life is school; that’s how I look at it. In my culture they say that when you stop learning you stop existing, so life is about learning, you are continually learning. Even today I’m still learning; I’m learning from all the different people who come into my life. What they bring to me is a gift, and then I can take that gift and share it with other people.

When you become a teenager, just like all of you here, the community will be interested in you because that is the second big initiation. The first initiation is that of being born.  The second big initiation you go through would be to find out again who you are. You might recognize initiation by how people act when they start to change rapidly, they start to feel rebellion against their parents.  You know when your parents say something you feel like you have to say ten more things to counteract that.  When this happens, there is a whole process that the entire village goes through.  First there is the need for the parents to recognize that you are becoming your own person. That brings some grief to them, to recognize that their little baby is no longer a little baby and is now becoming an adult. They mourn that. But it allows the young person to step into their place and be who they really are.

At that point they train you physically, and also emotionally. The reason is that if you are not prepared physically, mentally, and emotionally, then you can get stuck, and it’s true that sometimes people don’t come back from initiation. Just like here, when you get your driver’s license, if you are not really prepared for it, you can have an accident. That is a Western form of initiation. Another form of Western initiation is experimenting with sex, drugs and alcohol, your looks, your beauty, and what effect it is going to have in the world.  So you just have to remember that there are things about initiation, that when you experiment you can’t come back just as easily as you left. That’s how some people end up becoming alcoholics their entire lives, that’s how people end up being drug addicts their entire lives–because they need to reconnect with something bigger. All the pain they’re experiencing in their life is so great that they feel that they need something bigger to hold it.

When you go through initiation you are supposed to come back with your gift, something that you contribute to the world. At the end of it, you get this huge welcome from everybody in the village, and that in itself brings you back to life. And then you go through mentoring; it’s something that everybody needs, it doesn’t matter which culture you’re from. Because sometimes you have great ideas, but the way you go about bringing them forth is not life-giving.

After my initiation I was married to someone I had never met before. In my culture, they do arranged marriages. It was after the marriage that I met him, and for three years he wanted me to come to America.

My first experience in coming into this country was like being sent to the North Pole. I first landed in Michigan in the middle of winter, the 15th of January. When I landed everybody was looking at me like, “what planet is she coming from?” And it’s true, I was coming from a different planet.  When I landed in New York I had to change flights, and I couldn’t actually speak English. So I was running around talking to people about “Detrat.” And they are looking at me thinking, “What in the world is she talking about?” And finally I got to this policeman and kept on saying, “Detrat, Detrat,” and he looked at me and said, “What are you talking about?” so I showed him my ticket and he said, “Oh you mean Detroit!” and he took me to the flight.

I had no idea about cold. I had no idea about snow. My husband walked up to me and he handed me this heavy coat. I said, “What is this?” and he said, “Put it on, you’re going to need it.” I had never seen clothing so heavy in my life!  I said, “Is this something for someone to wear?” And he said, “Hey, you are either going to wear it, or you are going to freeze to death.” I was dressed in something like this, but with no sweater, and sandals, because this is how we dressed in the village.

The first time I saw snow, I kept wondering, “What is this thing? Is it corn flour? It’s crazy to dump all this corn flour. Let’s get some!”  I’m thinking about my family at home, and how we sometimes run out of food, and I’m saying, “Somebody’s crazy to dump all this corn flour.” And he’s looking at me, and he’s getting even more frustrated, and he doesn’t know how to answer all my questions, so he said, “When we go out you will understand.” Oh my God, I did understand. I didn’t even have to go out. Just with the door open, it was so cold, I was running back, and he caught me and said, “We have to go out!”

So that’s how I came to be in America. After two winters in Michigan I decided that’s long enough for me and I couldn’t take another winter and we moved to California, and so that’s how I ended up here.

I’m going to open it up now so you can ask questions.

Student: In our culture I’ve noticed that we value individual achievement, or an attitude of everyone for themselves. How can we create an environment that will foster a community-oriented attitude instead?

Sobonfu: Well, first we have to realize that we did not fall from the sky. We were born into a community and that community is very important. Whether the community pays attention to us or not, that is a different question, but that does not mean that we have to stop looking for ways to bring the attention of the community back to what is important. The role of a community is to not only help us come together, but to be able to give us each our gifts. The community supports the individual to bring their gift out and gives them a container inside of which they can put it.

So the way to start a community is to go with your determination to be able to find the kind of community that will support you and whom you can support also. It begins by us going out of our way.  Many times we don’t want to go out of our way because we don’t want to be bothered. When we start to say, “Well, I need community, so I am going to start to knock on people’s doors.” You may find some who will be frustrated with you. At the same time, you are also going to find people who are will get excited about finding community.

This means you will have to start to share more of yourself, share more of your dreams, and get people to join you in it. Many times people want to sit back and wait for you to form the community so they can come join you, but you have to let them know that in a community everybody must be active. Otherwise you get some people who sit and wait for everything, and a community doesn’t work that way. Everybody gives as needed, and everybody’s contribution is needed, whatever that contribution might be.

That’s because as far as community, I need to be transparent, translucent, so they know who they’re dealing with. The fear in people is because they want to be anonymous, so when you ask them to be a part of community it is a big challenge. One of the things that we have to work on is to let other people see, “Hey, I’m really this person. I don’t have anything to hide, so it’s okay for you to come out.” The more people are like that, the more you will see other people start to come out. That is what communities like Mt. Madonna are trying to teach people; just to be yourself. You don’t need to pretend to be somebody else for people to accept you. If you are yourself, then we can be ourselves also.

As I shared earlier, you need to have different rituals that celebrate the community, and mark the different transitions that the community goes through. Whether it be a newborn, a death, and so forth, because without that, again you go back to the place of anonymity where you are not able to come out and share your joy and share your sorrow. When people go to my village, they are very shocked when they see the poverty, but they’re also bewildered to observe how happy people are by simply knowing that they have each other.  That is a gift to them. That is their wealth right there. When somebody is hurting, everybody is hurting; and when somebody is happy, everybody is happy. So you see them crying together and laughing together. In fact, that’s what brings the richness into the community.

Student: Have you been back to your village since you came to live in the United States?

Sobonfu: Oh yes, I have to go back.  That’s how I keep my sanity. I need to check in with my elder and get my mentoring, so that I am sure I am not being foolish. You go back to the place where you come from when you die.  It’s always important for me to check in, to learn things that I didn’t know, so it is a viable thing that I am bringing, not something dead. Also it’s a way to keep in touch with my family, to meet my new nieces and nephews, and to see the others growing up also.  It is always exciting for me to go home, and it definitely has kept me somewhat sane.

Student: If someone moves around a lot, and has many homes, what home do you think they come back to when they are older? Is “home” about family, or it is it an actual place?

Sobonfu: The answer is yes, and more. Home is your family, but there is also the home in the heart of other people. When there is one person you know who genuinely loves you, you know you have a home in this person. You can count on that. And that’s why we love each other, and at the same time we drive each other crazy, because we’re looking for some home in each other. It’s important that we don’t lose sight of that. When there is a conflict with the person and they completely come apart from our lives, we’re cutting something vital out of our life. It’s very important to remember that when conflict arrives it means we need to cultivate a deeper intimacy with the other person, because there are things about the person we don’t know.  That’s why we’re having the conflict. We’re trying to preserve the home in their heart.

I was interested in the initiation you were talking about because I think that in the Western culture it’s not as personal. You were talking about how we experiment and get our licenses, and I don’t think those are as personal as what you were describing in your culture. You also said it prepared you emotionally, and I was wondering what you meant.

Sobonfu: Initiations prepare you emotionally in the sense that they help you to find the source of your emotion. When we are having a bad day, as we call it, we are looking for someone to blame. What we are required to do is look at the source of our emotion. A lot of times the people who end up being the recipient of our anger, or our frustration, are the people who are the closest to us. The thing to do is to tell them, “I’m having a hard day, here’s all the things that happened,” and basically bring out all the emotion in it. When we lose track of that, then we end up being very violent because we think that’s going to solve things.

Even at a young age you learn about emotion, because there is a lot of work around grief in my tradition. So you’re not a string that can break at any moment. Your emotion is flexible. Also there is a community ritual, because there is a communal aspect about grief that can only be healed in the context of community. Everybody’s in it, and everybody’s releasing it at the same time, so nobody needs to hang onto it anymore.

When you hang on to things, it’s like carrying a carcass around. Also, when you’re mad at someone for a long time, you’re unconsciously agreeing to carry their burden. I define revenge as making a cup of poisoned tea for someone to whom you feel resentment, and somewhere along the line you forget, and drink it yourself, and you get poisoned. That’s why it’s important to not stay mad too long. It’s ok to be mad, but do not carry it too long, because it will poison your life. Your precious energy goes towards holding that anger and causes your gifts to go dormant. You want to have your gift spark up, and be alive.

Initiation here is personal. The problem is that often we have the person personalize them, and we’ve taken them out of context, and we don’t put any value to them. We don’t feel like anybody’s really witnessing us in our process. That’s why it has become this anonymous experience that you referred to. The difference between that and the initiation of my home is that we have elders who put you through the process, and here you have to make your own initiation, you have to create it. The missing element is a welcoming community at the end to say, “You’ve done it. And we saw it, too. So come back, and bring the wisdom from that experience back to us.” As a result, we think, “Oh, nobody really noticed.” The psyche has a way of saying, “See, you didn’t do a thing. Go back and try again.” So you go back and you try even harder, and you come back with a big smile and you go, “Anybody notice? Anybody notice?” And you get silence again. So you say, “Oh, I still haven’t done anything. Maybe I should go back and try it again.” And so you end up being caught in a vortex of initiation. And sometimes you’re returning and sometimes you going back, and you don’t even know when you started and when you’ve ended. You’re just going through this kind of racing initiation and you never feel at peace.

Student: What inspired you to come to the United States?

Sobonfu: The honest answer is “nothing.” I always said that my elders made me come. I’d never really dreamt about leaving my community, because I really enjoyed being part of the community, the sharing of everything, the sharing of clothes, the sharing of underwear, everything, and the sharing of the heart also, that was very important to me. That was partially why I resisted coming here for a long time. And also I was married to someone who was teaching at the University of Michigan, which is in part why I came here.

Having been in this country, there are a lot of things that inspire me that I can take back and share with my country, which is very favorable for me, and for my people as well.

Student: Are there any aspects of the American community that you don’t like?

Sobonfu: I think there are a lot of things missing. In the way they bring children up, they do not have ritual to acknowledge the children. In a way, the basic foundation of life is no longer there for people. Being able to be yourself, and having people like you for who you are. Just for you to be seen by the entire community. And for people to be able to greet someone and to really mean, “How are you?” The basic human needs have been taken away. We end up thinking it is in something else, or in someone else, when we really need to have it right here. I could go on and on about the different things, but I really think there is a lot we need to bring back if we are going to be a surviving species.

Start with our children, validating our children. Like in my culture, each child is a gift to the community; each child is coming here because they have something unique they’re bringing to the community. That gift is vital to the survival of the community. Believe it or not, every single one of you is here because you have something unique to bring to the world. And it is important that the environment is set in a way that the gift is brought out. If the environment is not set in that way  then it is up to you as you grow up to find an environment where you can deliver the gift. As we value our young people, we are also ensuring the future. So far we haven’t seen any species survive without children, so we need our children. They are our past, they are our present, and they are our future. They are our gift from spirit. When I see people who look at the children and don’t see anything, that really does worry me, because it means our future doesn’t have anything.

Student: It seems that in our society children play a much more insignificant role than in your village. For example, the word teenager is almost a pejorative term. It seems that children are pushed too quickly into adulthood, and their process of growth is not valued. How can our society learn to give children a safe space where they can truly be themselves instead of portraying adolescence as an interim stage?

Sobonfu: As the young people, you know how critical it is to know the place of children in the community, and to know the kind of gift that children are bringing out to the world. Also you know that it is important to respect the different stages of life that children have to go through before they become adults, and to recognize that those stages are just as important as being an adult. Actually, being a teenager is something that people do not know how to open themselves up to because they are too scared of what they might be learning. So people don’t want to learn. They want to remain the same, and yet in life you have to continuously learn, you have to change.

I believe that is really what drives a lot of teenagers crazy because, especially when you go to big schools, nobody knows you. You go home and nobody looks at you. So hey, what’s up with that? How can I be myself when I can’t get attention anywhere? I have witnessed different youth groups which I have encountered, and I have been part of their meetings. For example, the Youth Coalition of San Francisco does different activities and they see the need of the young people’s voice. That has been really meaningful for them. I have heard people leaving the meetings and saying, ” I didn’t have a clue that these children had so much to share. Now I have an idea,” because before that it was out of their world. They have cultivated one mind, and so that is all they see. They are waiting for you to grow up when, in fact, you have been growing up all along.

Yes, it is true in my community that children are very valuable. In fact, they see them as spirits coming to test our generosity, coming to test our willingness and our sincerity. When you see children show up at your doorway, despite whatever craziness is going on, you stop and say, “Okay, what is going on here?” Once you have paid attention to that, then you don’t have the difference between the young people and the adults.

Student: You spoke of how important it is to carry out our vision and our gifts. What is the process that we can go through in order to understand what our mission, gifts, and visions are?

Sobonfu: Oftentimes what I recommend is to go back to early childhood, to look at pictures, places you have been to that have touched you, or activities that you used to do that made you very happy. Start to see why you haven’t continued doing so, and when you do them, do you feel happy again? Look at the different things that have come, that you have been connected with. That is whether it be different groups or feelings, and also what drives you. What kind of thing bothers you in the world? It is more likely that the things that bother you are where you have things to contribute.

For instance, you asked about community. If you feel bothered by the lack of community, chances are your gift is to ignite a sense of community in people’s lives again. Maybe people have already told you that you make a good friend simply because you are able to bring something different into their life that they cannot get anywhere else. That means that you have within you different elements that will help you to build community and inspire people to be within community. Your gift is not something that is so far removed from you that you cannot even comprehend it. It is often very close. In my tribe they say, “Where the wound is, is also where the gift is.” The gift and the wound are like one coin with two sides. If you turn one side, you are going to see the wound, but if you have the courage to flip it, then you are going to see the gift sitting there. You then use the wound as your foundation that drives you to give your gift.

Part of the difficulty is that we have been educated by the media to believe that we have to be some big figure in order to bring our gift out in the world. Oftentimes that is not how it comes. If you are not connected with your gift, you are going to then lose touch with yourself, and then everything is going to fall apart. Believe me, I have been there. I know that it is not worth it to think that you have to be somewhere else, or doing something else, when in fact you are just not in touch with your gift.

It is very important to know that what is burning within your heart is your gift. Oftentimes when you walk in nature, things start to come. You start to see images, but don’t think you are crazy. Start to write those images, because those are signs of what you need to do. Those are the different pathways that you are being given. Sometimes we say, “Oh, I’m seeing things, hearing something that nobody else is hearing, so I must be crazy.” No, just say, “I hear a different language,” and it is okay. How can you apply that? How can you bring it out to the world?

You have to do something.  You cannot just sit and think that it is going to miraculously happen out of the blue. You can receive your gift and then you can deliver it to people. I have to say, though, that sometimes there is a difference between knowing your purpose and actually having the courage to be able to fulfill your purpose. The trouble that you may go through is actually a challenge as to whether you are able to bring your gift out, or whether you are going to keep it. Now the thing is, when you keep it and you do not deliver it to the world, you then turn it into a poisonous gift to yourself. It then becomes a major illness that will take your life away. It is very important that you not look at all the different challenges that you encounter in your life as barriers that hold you back, but as things that give you energy. Things that you can draw from to continue on, so you can be more determined to be able to do what you are here for.

Student: You speak a lot about rituals in your book. Do you think that the United Sates has lost a lot of the rituals and openness towards children?

Sobonfu: I would say so, simply because the sense of community has deteriorated. We have lost touch with our extended family; we have lost touch with our community. By African standards, it’s not only your child. Your child is a gift lent to you and you must care for it. When you are bringing up a child, two people cannot be a child’s world; you need an entire community. That’s why we feel like we have to crucify our parents, because we feel like they are not meeting our needs. We’re thinking that our parents are our community. But they cannot be everything. It’s impossible. So we need to reach out to other people, and get what we need from them. You look for someone who has the things you do not have. And you take that, and the rest you don’t worry about. When you have more people taking care of this child, what the parents will realize is that they are more sane when dealing with the child. If nobody else is there, you’re going to go crazy! It’s true! So the more people there are in the child’s life, the more the world is opened in that child’s life.

Student: In your book you spoke a lot about relationships. You wrote how in the Dagara tribe it is not the individual’s job to create relationships; it is Spirit that does that. You also said that romance is a way of hiding our true self.  I was wondering what you meant by that.

Sobonfu: It is a very good question. I was wondering when you were going to ask that question! You have to understand that in my tradition any form of relationship is based on Spirit. First you have to be spirit, because you are spirit, embodied in the human form that has taken on this suit we call the body. When you walk, you vibrate an energy that your spirit sends out, and so every single time you meet somebody, your spirit meets their spirit first. Also if you meet somebody, it is because there is a reason for you to meet that person. In other words, we do not believe in accidents. Everything is meant to be. As a result, when you get into a relationship with someone, the first thing you want to know is which spirit is bringing us together, and what does this spirit want us to do? When you start to ponder on that question, things then become clear for you. Otherwise there is a tendency for us to want to jump into love relationships immediately without really exploring what it could mean.

In the village, when you meet people, you are not looking at them from a romantic perspective. You are looking at them first as a spirit, second as spirit with gifts to give, third as human beings having something to contribute to the world, and then whatever transpires from that.  You don’t bypass those three steps and say, “Well, I’m going to be here.” What I have noticed is that in romantic relationships there is a desire for us to be accepted and to be loved. As a result we are willing to go out of our way to show our best part. We don’t want anybody to know where our weaknesses are, so when we get into a relationship everything is fine until the masks start to wear off. When the masks wear off, the true self starts to shine and the other person goes, “Wait a minute! This is not the person I met. What happened to that person?”

So romance is an illusion in the sense that it basically takes you away from yourself, away from your community, so you can cultivate a relationship with only one other person. Sometimes the person you think you are cultivating the relationship with is not really that person, because they are not really there. You can be sitting with somebody and their spirit is 10,000 miles away, so you cannot really say you are cultivating a relationship with them.

It does not mean that when you acknowledge the spirit, there is not going to be love. If you acknowledge the spirit, the love that you feel from one another will be beyond romance. You have gone beyond the false sense. You have gone beyond the hiding of the true identity to a place where the two spirits truly have merged. Then you have a true sense of love.

I think the outfit, the things that the romance wears to make itself appealing to us, is not really what we want to call romance. It is a connection with spirit, but because many of us are afraid of spirit, or the thought that something else is responsible for our coming together, we want to cut spirit away from it. That is when romance becomes troublesome. It is very important to look at the attraction that you feel with someone else as driven by something bigger than who you are, or what the two of you could ever imagine. If you can look at it that way, then you are beginning to get close to the positive sense of romance. Otherwise you will then be looking at the attire that romance wears to make itself appealing, and you think, “I don’t have to look any further.”

Student: In our society we are brought up with the idea of romance ingrained in us. Is it possible to change that basis upon which we enter relationships? In other words, is there a way that a relationship can develop from being based merely on romantic attraction to a spirit-based relationship?

Sobonfu: Yes, definitely. It’s just like what I shared about finding the positive side in romance. What you need to do first is to remember the first encounter, and the spirit that you felt between you two. If you can remember that spirit and go back to it often, then you begin to take the relationship to a place where it is not going to be ego-driven. If you can begin to bring your larger community support to the relationship, then you create an environment that will sustain the relationship. Be able to renew your relationship often, because we think that once we have said, “Yes, I do,” it’s over. However, sometimes the relationship goes through changes, and you need to say many “I do’s,” and, “Yes, I am committed to going with you again. Let’s do this again.” A relationship needs to be continuously renewed, because if it is not, then it will not go anywhere.

I have also found that when I do not do ritual, whether it is a relationship with my sister or a relationship with my brother or friend, I start to lose something within that relationship. I feel disconnected with them until I can do something to ignite it again. A modern style relationship can be lacking in the dimensions beyond the romance. This is because when we only see the romantic and the relationship starts to grow, we can’t go beyond that because we only want to see this person in a certain way. However, life is saying, “Let’s take the next step together.” So if you are able to take the next step together, then you can still have the romance in the next step. The key is to have both people do that step. A western relationship can stay long and lasting with the commitment of two people. If you remember the first time you met, and go back to that energy thinking about how strong you were, especially in times of difficulty, you can draw from that again.

Student: When you wrote in your book sharing your community in Africa, were you ever afraid that people wouldn’t accept it? Were you ever scared that people might not see it for what it is?

Sobonfu: I don’t know, maybe it’s my upbringing, but I never thought for a second to have fear about sharing. My way of thinking is you put it out; if it’s accepted, great, if not, hey, life continues. The only part that I was concerned about, was if it was misinterpreted, then we could end up with people thinking something that is completely different than what I put out. And I notice it when I teach, sometimes people will repeat what I said, and I go, “No, that’s not what I’m saying.”  But it’s good, in the sense that it’s helping me be clear. So I like that kind of challenge when it comes. I really let it go, because I feel that it’s a gift that I put out. I’m not going to supervise, and see if people are taking it in. If they don’t take it in, oh well.

Student: It seems that in the Dagara tribe the elders are the platform, and they’re the ones who hold the community together. And it seems in our society we’ve lost that respect for elders. I have two question. Why is there such a big difference between the two cultures, and how can we change our view of elders? How can we learn to take in their knowledge and grow from that?

Sobonfu: The elders are valued because they have not only gained knowledge, but that knowledge is there for people to use. It is the seeking of the elder out of the person that turns the person into an elder, just like it is the seeking of wisdom in a person that turns knowledge into wisdom. As an elder, after a time, your gift can become a burden if it’s not sought out, and I think that’s what’s happening to a lot of elders in this culture.  I believe that one of the causes of Alzheimer’s comes from that, because what’s the point of having something nobody wants?

Student: My grandmother has Alzheimer’s. And it’s gotten to the point where she knows who I am, but everything’s kind of foggy, and it’s very sad. How do you, in your culture deal with sickness, and how do you validate someone when you don’t know if they even know you anymore?

Sobonfu: What I usually do with people who have Alzheimer’s, whom I knew before, is I tell them stories of things we’ve done. I’ll repeat these same stories over and over, and they start to click in. Eventually, they will be able to finish the story for you, but you have to continue. A lot of times we give up on people who are sick because we don’t know how to relate to them. So it’s about knowing that this is a human being also.  At one time, they were at their height and they were brilliant, and now they’re frail we can’t relate to them. You establish a new relationship with them. Instead of them telling the story, you tell them the story. It helps them tremendously. When you do that they become part of your life, so you are giving back to them.

So, how does everybody feel?  The reason I ask that is that in my tradition there are many levels of emotion. Sometimes there are more than one, and sometimes we feel like we don’t have any emotions at all. One of the emotions you can recognize rapidly is indifference, or numbness. Those are the times when,  in my culture, they say you are “drowning in your own emotions.” When you start to come out of that numbness, you start to experience shock, because you’re finally waking up into something. You say, “God, what is this that I’m going through?”  Then the next emotion that you start feeling is anxiety. You start to eat your fingers. (I’m jumping because there are many different emotions; I’m just saying the basics.) The one after anxiety is sadness. And then after sadness comes anger. After anger comes rage. And after rage comes release of emotions. You work the emotion out. And when you release, what you will experience is calm, peaceful, joyous, restful, and happy. That’s the other side of it. But if you start to feel it, you get to the sadness, and the anger, and then you repress it, you start to walk the ladder backwards, you get back to frustration, you get back to depression, you get back to hopelessness, and then suicidal feelings. It’s important to work your emotions out. So when you feel different, ask yourself, “Why am I feeling different? What’s holding me? What’s keeping me trapped? What’s drowning me right now?” So you can start to work your way out of it.

Mr. Mailliard: What do you think is the most important thing that young people need to know these days in our culture? What is the most important message you have for them?

Sobonfu: Well, they need to know that they have things to give. Every single one of you is irreplaceable. No one can replace you and what you bring to the world is really invaluable. You have to believe that. You have to remember it any time when you are in doubt that you are not just here as a tourist, but here because you have something to give to this world. No matter what the world looks like, no matter how dark it is outside, you have to remember that the fire burning within your heart is the very fire that the world needs to survive. So when you are out there, always remember that the gift you have for the world is going to take the world to the next step.

You are the fresh air that is going to come and make the lungs of this world breathe again. If you do not give your gift, you are not only robbing yourself of something valuable, but you are also robbing the entire world of your gift. Any time you want to withdraw, any time you want to pull back, think about how critical your contribution is to the world. Yes, life is difficult, but at the same time, if you have one another, if you can stick together, then you will continue to have that heartbeat that keeps you going.

So thank you, God bless you.

Mr. Shultz has taught at Stanford, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became involved in politics in 1955 during the Eisenhower administration, when he served as senior staff economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. Following this, he has held a range of positions, including Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of the Treasury. In 1982, he became the sixtieth US Secretary of State under President Regan, a position he held until 1989.

Mr. Shultz holds a number of honorary degrees, from universities such as Columbia, Carnegie-Mellon, and Keio University in Tokyo. He has authored many books, including Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State, a memoir of his time in office.

He is currently a Distinguished Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Economist/Former Secretary of State

Student: We’re interested to know why you choose a life of public service.

Shultz: I was interested in issues of public policy. In my college days I majored in economics, and I was involved with something called the School of Public and International Affairs, it’s now called the Rigor Wilson School at Princeton. I was interested in that kind of thing, and I wrote my thesis as an undergraduate on the agricultural program of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was a big thing back then. So I studied this big public policy initiative; I was interested in those things, and in studying economics.

After I got my Ph.D. in economics, I as invited to become a member of the senior economist on the staff of President Eisenhower’s Economic Advisors. So I was around and about and I got an idea of how Washington worked, and I also got to know some people. And as fate would have it, when Nixon got elected, he invited me to be Secretary of Labor.  So that led me from one thing to another. So it’s partly my interest in public policy issues, and then that caused certain things to happen. You meet people, and then all of a sudden you get asked to do something you say “Sure.”

Student: Did you ever imagine you would reach this level of success?

Shultz: Well, my wife and I didn’t plan on having five children. But we love them all; they’re wonderful kids, they’re all married. I have twelve grandchildren. I never imagined I’d have that warmth. My wife died after fifty years of marriage, and it was very hard, but I was lucky a couple of years later to meet another wonderful woman, so life has been good to me.

You probably mean being Secretary of State. But you know, you ask yourself, “what is success?” There are all kinds of ways of defining it, but I think that people who have warm families are very lucky and successful in the sense that famiily is a supporting element in one’s life.  There is really no good substitute for it..

I had no particular plan in my life. I didn’t plan to be Secretary of State. I was interested in economics, so I studied it. I got a job teaching at MIT, where I did my Ph.D.  In the course of time, people offered me jobs of one kind or another, and usually I could tell in practically one minute whether I thought it was an interesting job.  Most of the things that were offered to me I turned down. Every once in a while, something comes along, and you say, “this I gotta do.” When I was asked to go to Washington, and serve on President Eisenhower’s economic advisory staff, I said, “this is a good opportunity.” It was just a one year leave of absence from MIT. Then when I was invited to be a professor at the University of Chicago, I knew instantly that was a good thing for me to do, and so on. So one things leads to another, and you kind of evaluate them as you go. There’s lots of things you turn down, and there’s lots of experiences that probably would have been good for me. I’ve never been unemployed; I’ve never had to look for a job. I was always choosing among jobs that were in front of me, and it might have been a good thing to have to struggle a bit more.

Student: What is the right way for our increasingly interlinked economies to be properly involved with each other, especially since there is so much political pressure to use any means to maintain economic growth?

Shultz: Well, countries want to grow, you want your country to grow. It provides a much better environment for you to get the kind of job you want, or if you don’t like it leave it, and you can get another job. So growth is good for people, by and large, everywhere. You have to think about the environment that you may be creating. There are some ways of growing that need to be curtailed, but by and large, economic growth is good for people, so countries want to have it.

In trade, you have an event where everybody gains. If you don’t gain something, you won’t trade. You only trade when you gain something. In some cases, somebody may make a really good bargain and gain more than you do. But you won’t trade unless you gain. So having an arrangement that makes trade easy tends to enhance the general good. As in any other kind of economic activity, as things change some people are put out of a job by change. With trade, all kinds of changes take place. You live in a time, in a society, where you have to expect that you’re going to be confronted with rearrangements.  So you need to be ready to be flexible. I think that, as a world, we can maintain openness to trade, and openness to investment, we’ll all be better off. I would say reasonable openness to immigration is a good thing as well, particularly for the United States.

Student: One of the things I have been recently thinking about a lot is the relationship between the individual and society, and what responsibility the individual has when participating in society. It seems that some systems we have set up, particularly the capitalist system, have been exploited by people who have used it to promote their self interest and greed. It creates class levels, where the wealthy seem to benefit from the work of a lower class. What is our responsibility, as individuals in the capitalist system, towards the welfare of society?

Shultz: Did you read The Wealth of Nations in your study of economics? Have you studied economics?

Student: I haven’t studied economics.

Shultz: A well known economist named Adam Smith wrote a book in 1776 called The Wealth of Nations. The book describes how the wealth of nations would come about. Smith has a very famous phrase in there that goes something like this: “In a competitive environment, each individual acts in his or her own interests.  As if by an invisible hand, this will lead to the greater general good.” So the market system, the capitalist system, is posited on the idea that you are going to seek the best you can for yourself. If we keep you in a competitive environment, without some monopolistic advantage, other people will challenge you. You’ll thrive; other people will challenge you, you’ll have to face competition. You won’t be able to act in excess due to competition. And the process of you and others doing well leads to the general good. That’s the underlying notion, and it has basically worked well. There are abuses, as in any systems, but if you compare a market based system with the command and control system, as epitomized by the Soviet Union, you see on the one hand they didn’t produce very well, and on the other hand it terribly inhuman in the way it treated people. So, markets tend to centralize power and taken together with the governmental process we have in the US, where the key is checks and balances, no one can run away with things. The framers of our Constitution tried to design it so that we have three branches of government, and they check and balance each other. So, on the whole it seems to me a good system, even though it’s certainly possible, as in any big system, to point to things that didn’t go right. But on the whole, we’ve managed to correct them when we can.

But, you ask, as an individual, are there things you should do?  Yes, I think yes there are. You want to do your best; you shouldn’t cheat, you try to behave in an honorable way. I think there are others in society who aren’t able to participate fully the way you’d like them to. So I think that the tradition we have in this country of volunteerism, of going and trying to help, is a good thing.  You find lots of people in business who do it. I think, in a sense, morality can be exercised by the individual.  But at the same time, there’s nothing wrong with sticking to your own interests in the market environment, because that’s what produces the overall good result.

Student: Mr. Shultz, usually we think of our ethical and moral systems as informing other arenas of society, such as economic policy. From reading your writings, however, I’m beginning to think that you envision a different relationship between economics and other informing principles. For example you said in one essay that, “Market and enterprise based policies lead not just to economic development but to a rise in levels of education so necessary for an individual’s and society’s continued advancement.” From this I am inferring that sound economic policies may be a way to create the ground upon which cultural morality can flourish. Would you explain how you see the relationship between cultural values and economic policy?

Shultz: I think it’s a very interactive process.  In the history of our country we’ve had a strong moral, religious, ethical underpinning, a kind of civilized way of thinking that has been a base. Maybe we have come to take it for granted too much in recent times, but it’s been there, and you build everything on top of it. A good economy doesn’t flourish without some kind of a stable base.

For example, as an investor you look at country X, asking “should I put my money there?” The thing you want to know is, is there stability there? Is there predictability there, so that I know it’s going to be the same five years from now, more or less. You have the best chance of stability over time if the regime is decent. Probably that means democratic, but even if it isn’t democratic, in the purest sense of the word, if it’s civilized and predictable, and it understands the importance of having the rule of law, then you’re going to be better off. Having said that, I think that if an economy is opened up, it flourishes on enterprise and market bases, then it gives more dignity to individuals. It gives them the chance for self-expression; it gives them the chance to do things for themselves, instead of having the state do it for them. That’s fulfilling to the individual and to the communities that they’re a part of.

You also get other things. I’ve been studying comparative demography lately. And I’m absolutely stunned by what I see around the world, the variations and shape of the world to come is practically inevitable because of the demography.  One of the things you will see is, and this goes contrary to everybody who’s worried about the population explosion, that the world’s going to be inundated by people. It’s not going to happen. The reason is that the minute you come by an educated woman with the prospect of an improved standard of living, the fertility rates drop like a stone. It happens across cultural lines, ethnic lines, religious lines, geographic lines. There aren’t any lines that divide this principle. A lot of poor, very populous countries have been condemned to poverty by virtue of the way their economies have been managed. They have been managed according to a central planning, socialist communist motif, that just hasn’t worked. I don’t think there’s much to be said for it from an ethical point of view, but leaving that aside, this is an observation: it just doesn’t work. And the economies that have organized by market and enterprise principles, by and large have worked. They’ve seen expansion.

But coming back to your question, I think it’s interactive. What happens as a result of the way economic policy is set up, has tremendous effects on the opportunities that people have. I think open economic and political systems give more opportunities for people to express themselves, and to have a sense of individual accomplishment and fulfillment.

Student: Michael Sandel wrote in his book Democracy’s Discontent, “The effort to banish moral and religious argument from the public realm for the sake of political agreement may end by impoverishing political discourse and eroding the moral and civic resources necessary to self-government.” When our country was founded there was a strong Republican notion, espoused by Jefferson and others, that the government had a vital role in developing the civic virtue of its citizens. Do you think the government has any place in the formation of the moral character of its citizens? If so, how? If not, who does have that responsibility?

Shultz: I think the responsibility is widely distributed. It works best if people in all walks of life feel a responsibility. What can government do to shape an environment that’s conducive? Well, I think that education is a big factor. That’s not something traditionally we’ve done on a central level, and I’m very glad it’s that way.  We need to work in our various communities to improve the quality of education. There’s big debate going on right now, about the degree to which it would be better if we provided people with a choice about education. Wealthy people have a choice; poor people don’t.  A lot of us are advocating a system in which the money we spend on education, instead of giving it to the bureaucrats to spend, goes directly to parents who don’t have a choice of where their children go.  We think that will improve the quality of education. There are things like that you can debate. It seems to me that having a system where tolerance is possible is also good. This country was founded by people who wanted to get away from intolerant religious biases. We have lots of different religions, and we need to conduct ourselves so that we don’t try to force one on somebody. Let me point out something about a tolerant society: tolerance doesn’t mean anything unless there is a standard. If there’s no standard, there’s nothing to be tolerant of, it’s just chaos. So I think that somehow in our lives, and in the way the country develops, having standards is a good thing. And maybe you tolerate some deviants from that standard, but you need to have a standard to which people are held accountable.

Student: What do you think is the single biggest threat in a coherent world economy?

Shultz: We’re about to have a conference about this today here at the Hoover Institution. For two and a half days, we will be discussing the threat of chemical and biological warfare. I think that’s about the biggest threat to our lives, including our economic lives, as anything that’s around these days. In other words, the threats to economic development aren’t just things that go wrong in the international economy, but things that go wrong in the security system. When we have a security system, and people feel safe, that tends to cause investment and economic development to move forward. When they’re uncertain, they “un-invest.” So if you were to ask me what’s the biggest threat, I would say that’s it.

Student: Mr. Shultz, as someone who has made a career of settling disputes all over the world, what would you say are the most important principles of conflict resolution?

Shultz: Well, be modest about what you can do. And be patient, and be determined, and steadfast–a kind of “patient impatience” is the way you have to approach these things. Part of negotiation and conflict resolution is analyzing what the forces are, and what’s the real reason for this conflict, and we’ll operate from there. And I think also you have to be willing to take action. The most effective action is early action, but that’s the most difficult, because you’re not sure what’s going to happen. So you intervene early, before things get out of hand. People say “no, wait till you’re sure.” By the time you’re sure, the situation has unraveled to the point that you have a hard time putting it back together again. There are legions of examples of this.

Right now, we are in a terrible pickle, in my opinion, with Bosnia. If we had intervened early on, during the Bush administration, or the early part of the Clinton administration, we could have prevented the worst of the ethnic cleansing, the dividing of the country, and the bitterness that emerged from the killing and the brutality. But we didn’t. We finally intervened, and we managed to stop the fighting, and we constructed an agreement, called the Dayton agreement. We negotiated. There are two parts to it. The military forces move in and separate people. Then there’s a political part that says “we want to put Bosnia back together again.” In other words, refugees go back to their homes, and we reconstruct a multi-ethnic society. One part separates, the other part says put it back together. And if you are asked to be the mediator who does that, my advice is, decline. We are in a terrible problem in there, because we know if we withdraw our forces, it’s just going to erupt.  We’ll be right back where we stared from; we didn’t do any good. But we don’t want to have a lot of people there indefinitely, so how do you construct a situation where you can remove them without renewed fighting?  Well, you construct a working, happy, multi-ethnic society. And how do you do that? It’s practically impossible. So people say, “well, if that’s impossible, we better set up for the kind of divisions that are over there.” We don’t want to do that, so it’s a dilemma. The worst part of it is, it hasn’t been turned to people. There hasn’t been any discussion in this country; we just kind of know vaguely that our forces are over there, and so far haven’t been blown up. But as soon as they try to do something to implement the political side of the Dayton Accords, they will they’ll get right into the fray, and people will start getting killed. Then we’ll probably withdraw them, and that won’t be a pretty picture.

So, conflict resolution is important. When you know you’re going to have to intervene, intervene early, and nip things in the bud. Of course it’s hard to do that, because people say, “well how are you so smart to know to take this sort of reaction?” So in the tough situations it’s difficult.

Student: You spoke earlier of China’s rich cultural heritage. I was wondering did you find in dealing with other countries on delicate issues that mistakes were made based on cultural misunderstandings, or was there an unique cultural international diplomacy that allows for relatively easy cross-cultural understanding?

Shultz: You have to be sensitive to cultural differences. If you conduct yourself in a way that shows that you respect what has been put there by the past, it helps you. But in the end, I think the important thing is to be candid and clear. There are people who say yes and mean no, but you just have to interpret how they say yes. It’s not so easy. There can be problems, but I think if you can be alert to them, and it’s not that difficult to read up on them, to be cognizant at least of the main things, and to avoid aggravating things.

We need to respect other people, but we also need to respect ourselves. People say that in the Arab world, where women are in the background, we shouldn’t have women representing US interests, that if we try to have a woman deal with the head of government, it’s going to fail. To that, I say, “In our society we have a different attitude than they do. So why should we let them dictate how we represent ourselves our way?” And it turns out that if we have strong, effective women, we’ll be fine.

Student: Mr. Shultz, today it seems fashionable to say that Americans are cynical and they have a very base sense of morality. As someone who has lived through an incredible sequence of historic events, from the Great Depression to the post-Cold War victory of free market economics, do you think that these have created a significant erosion of values of Americans?

Shultz: Yes, I do. I think there’s a different pattern in our public life than there used to be. There’s less confidence and trust in people. There’s almost a presumption that if you go into public life there must be some nefarious reason, and we must investigate and find out why. So all of that I think is taking a toll. At the same time I think people at large, there’s a little different process going on, and I think all the discussion we’re having about values and families and communities, is positive. It’s causing us to reexamine our behavior.  Maybe right now we are saying to ourselves, “our values system has eroded, and it doesn’t feel good.” So maybe we ought to try and put back some of the things that have gotten away from us: a little more willingness to think about other people, to sacrifice a little bit, and to be more tolerant.  So I think things have deteriorated, and I think there is a reaction to it. At least I hope so. I think the most objectionable thing is the tendency of people to be intolerant. Having said that, I listen to people criticizing the deterioration of our values, and I think they’re right. As a matter of fact, more and more people are saying that.

Student: Mr. Shultz, looking on your life experience, is their any advice you could give to our generation?

Shultz: I think you should try to be yourself, do the things that you want to do, that are satisfying. People ask me often if I aspired to be Secretary of State. And I say, “No, I didn’t. I didn’t ask for it. I just tried to do interesting things, and to do the best I could, and the future would take care of itself.” I have five children. They’re all nice people; they’re pretty happy. I think the happiest one is the eldest child, who teaches science in high school. It’s so fulfilling for him. The people who are the happiest and the most fulfilled are the ones who are doing things that they decided they wanted to do, and spend their life doing it.

I don’t think that there’s any mystery on how to conduct yourself. You have talents that the good Lord gave you, so use them. Use them to help yourself along, and make yourself a constructive part of your community. It seems to me that if you do that, the rest kind of takes care of itself. I don’t mean go rise up and be President or something, but you tend to have a satisfying life. It’s fulfilling. And that is, in the end, what you’re trying to have, not a happy life but a fulfilling life, where you feel as though you’ve made a difference in some way, you’ve made the world a little better.

Well, you’re a very impressive bunch, and you’ve read all kind of things I didn’t think anybody knew to read. I have to be careful what I write. Well, good luck to you all.

Students: Thank you.

I’d started it a few years earlier, and that’s what I’m doing now and I would love to answer your questions. I understand you’re meeting with one young member of Congress; our mission is to get more young women in Congress, because to say that there are few doesn’t even give you the idea. There are eighty women out of 535, and there are only four women under forty, they’re about thirty men under forty in Congress. That’s are job, to try to get more young women into office, and also to try to get high school women, college women, the younger women to start thinking about politics as a career, and to start understanding the importance of actually getting involved and engaged in politics. So I’ll leave it at that and let you guys ask me anything you want to hear about.

Casey Lightner: I’m Casey, and can you talk about how you came to be the co-founder and President of Women Under Forty PAC?

Susannah Shakow: So I told you all I was working in this law firm, I had gone to law school because I wanted to do policy work. I never wanted to be a real lawyer, my husband, whose law firm we’re using, is a real litigator. He does what I always think of, the actual law and I was doing policy and lobbying work at this law firm. So, I spent a lot of time up on Capitol Hill, lobbying various members, and there were a lot of other young women also working at the law firm. We would get together for lunch and talk about the fact that it just seems so strange that there were a lot of people our age or a little bit older who were members of Congress, but none of them were women.

We were just so aware of the fact that we had so many issues that we felt were very particular to our age group and our gender, and there was nobody there representing our views. We decided to start this pack, another woman and myself. Initially it was just women in our law firm, and then we’ve grown out from there. It’s a really fun thing to do, because I think a lot of young women don’t think about politics at all, and once you start explaining to them how important it is, but also how sexy it can be. It really is, it’s more exciting, I think, then a lot of people give politics credit for, and that’s part of our job to show that element.

Nina Castanon: Hi, I’m Nina. Do you have any success stories so far?

Susannah Shakow: Yeah, we have a lot of success stories, and I’ll tell you a little bit about our PAC just to set it up. We are an all volunteer group, except for me, which is an amazing thing to have a group in Washington that actually functions and does so much. All of my staff, like Alyse Nelson Bloom, who helped set up some of your meetings, she’s the program director of Vital Voices. We’ve got several prominent attorneys, we’ve got people involved in human rights groups, and they do these busy jobs but they also maintain board positions for us and it’s kind of amazing to me everyday that it really works, that people are so committed to the cause that they actually can find time to do two full time jobs. So, success stories. We started in ’99, when we had the very beginning of this idea. In ’99, there was one woman in Congress under forty; it would have been Blanche Lincoln, she was the first senator ever elected under forty. Our first real election was in the year 2000, and that year we had five people elected. We can’ take, obviously, full credit for getting these women elected, but every year we’ve had more and more people elected, this year there are four people right now who are under forty in Congress, and if things go even marginally well, we should have eight by November.

I think that the most good that we do is because we’re small, and we don’t raise an enormous amount of money. We’re not like Emily’s List where we’re funding these people’s campaigns, you know we might make or break a campaign. A lot of these people don’t get a lot of support from the traditional donors, or the traditional ways that candidates get support. Many of them have come up to us and said, “You helped us to believe in our campaigns, and to believe in our candidacies. When nobody else was supporting us, you all were there supporting us.” It’s such a hard job being a candidate; it’s nice to have people on your side from the beginning. That’s definitely one of our successes, but we have grown so much over the past, I’m trying to think how many years it has been, we really started everything in 2002. It’s been about four years, but we now have over a thousand members, and we’re starting college chapters around the country. People are trying to get the fact that there is this disparity between young men and young women in Congress, and the fact that young women just don’t run. This year we actually have more young women running then we’ve ever had before. Hopefully, that will be a trend that continues.

Seychelle deVries: Hi, I’m Seychelle. Given that, In the US, women have roughly the same education as men and are just as capable and have just as much to gain from the political process, why is there such disparity in how many go to the polls?

Susannah Shakow: I think that is an excellent question, and I really don’t know the answer, and I think everyone has theories as to why it is. First of all, the interesting thing is that Women, over all, actually do vote at a slightly higher rate then men. Even young women vote at a slightly higher rate. I don’t know if you guys know, but the latest statistic I saw for young voters was that, I think it’s between 18 and 24 year olds, that it’s 37% of young women and 31% of young men. That’s just ridiculous, that it’s so low, and we’re paying so little attention to such an important thing. The real question is why women are not as involved as men in politics. I think a lot of it is tradition, which women just traditionally didn’t get as involved. I think the main way that you see it is in money. Men have always been the ones who wrote the campaign checks, and who wrote the big checks and gave the big money.

There are great successes with groups like Emily’s List, that are finally getting women to realize the importance of writing checks and getting out there, and that campaigns are made or broken on money. Even though we have Emily’s List, most candidates that I talk to will say, “I’ve got this supporter who says that she would do anything for me, and I say, ‘Well I really need money,’” and she says, “Here you go,” and hands her a twenty five dollar check. It’s still so hard to get women to actually open their purses and give the money that’s need to support the candidates that they want, and I do think that a lot of that just is tradition, and Emily’s List is starting to change the mindset. In fact, one of the thing’s we’re doing at WUFPAC is that students can join WUFPAC for ten dollars, which is nothing. Most PAC’s its several hundred dollars to join, but we decided we wanted to get even our youngest members into the tradition of giving money, and we encourage even our youngest members to write two checks to a campaign. They could be ten dollar checks over the two year cycle, but it’s just starting to get used to the idea of giving money. I hope that answers your question.

Mark Hansen: There seems to be a perfect symmetry between what you do and the work of Vital Voices, so how do you see the connection?

Susannah Shakow: I actually, thanks to Alyse, I’m going on the most wonderful trip on Thursday to Kuwait to meet with women there. I’m sure you guys know that Kuwait just got the vote after thirty or forty years of fighting, so their first political candidates, you heard this from Melanne Verveer so you know all about it, but she wanted me to go on the trip and teach them a little bit about how to start an organization that advocates for the women, that they want to get elected. I really think that America can learn so much from the rest of the world, whether it’s a new place like Kuwait and just sort of helping them as they try to figure out how the system is going to work, or looking at all of the other countries who are doing such a better job then we are at getting women elected to offices. I bet you heard a lot of these statistics from Melanne, but it’s just so stunning to me that of all the countries in the world that we are, but the number keeps changing, but we’re 56 or 60th in terms of the number of women we have in our parliament, or in our legislative body. Countries like Rwanda is number one, and it’s just so interesting that country that we think isn’t a very free place, that they’ve done such a better job of getting women involved in politics, the women understand the importance of running. I think that it’s so vital that all groups look to the rest of the world for examples of how it’s done, and also to share what we’ve learn about how we’re doing it.

Prabha Sharan: Hi, I’m Prabha. You talked about WUFPAC, and what are the challenges you face to make people understand the importance of WUFPAC?

Susannah Shakow: There are a lot of challenges that are very unique to us, first of all we are a bipartisan group, and really we are a nonpartisan group. We don’t even look at party, I’ll tell you more about that later, because that’s sort of a frustration for us too. We don’t have any litmus test, so we look at candidate, I just spent yesterday looking to see who’s filed recently who’s under forty, and if you’re under forty and you have a real campaign, if you have campaign manager, if you’ve started to raise real money, you don’t have to be a candidate that’s going to win. You could be in a race that looks impossible, but you have to be someone who is a serious candidate. We run afoul of so many different groups. Democrats, true, real, hardcore democrats don’t like us because we are bipartisan, we give money republican candidates. The same thing with the republican national committee, we’ve tried to get money out of them and we give money to democratic candidates.

A lot of women’s groups are pro-choice, and they don’t like us very much because we’re all inclusive and the pro-life groups also. We have unique challenges because we’ve decided there are so few young women that run every year, I just did the tally yesterday, I think it’s eighteen candidates who are under forty, women who are running for Congress who are under forty, so there’s so few women who are run that if we started saying that we’re only going to take democrats, and of those democrats we’re only going to take the pro-choice democrats, and of those only the people who really look like they’re going to win, which I’m telling you a lot of the groups do, they just make it more narrow because they want to use their resources wisely. We start out with a field of fifteen to eighteen candidates, so we’ve decided that our mission is to get young women excited and interested, and not just young republican women, or young democratic women, or young women who believe in choice or not choice, but right now want to get young women thinking about politics and supporting other young women running.

While high school and college women and men get that idea, strangely to me it really is an age thing. The higher up you go the more you say, “You’re not part of my group and I don’t want to support.” That’s our biggest challenge, explaining that it is important for us to have this inclusivity. I hop that it will never change, but it is a challenge of us in terms of raising money, because the big pockets are the older, more established folk, so we’re thinking of more creative ways of making money then trying to get it from some of the traditional sources. That’s probably way more then you wanted to know about that. One little side note too; we are a non partisan group. For reasons that I don’t know, and we’ve got a student this summer whose sole job is going to be to study this, we only have democratic candidates, for the most part. Every so often we’ll have a handful of republican candidates, whether it’s for federal office or state and local, it’s just amazing how many democrats there are. Every time we find a republican we all cheer because we’re trying so had to be bipartisan, but republican young women don’t run.

Luke Sanders-Self: Do you ever feel daunted by the size of the issues you’re working on?

Susannah Shakow: Yes. I think all of us have times every day when we think, “This is just impossible.” For some of the reasons that you were asking me about, it would be a lot easier for us to do something where we are popular with some of the big groups, if we decided to have a mission where we were democratic and pro-choice, then supported all women, we would have more friends so it is daunting to try and do something that a lot of people don’t really get. Those of us working on this believe so strongly that if you don’t get young women into office, it’s not just that young women’s views won’t be heard, and I do that that is a problem, that young women’s issues are not on the table nearly as much as they should be. Really, I think there is a much deeper reason that we’re working for this.

In our system people who run for Congress, like Anthony Weiner, I don’t know how old he was when he got elected, but he was young. He was probably early thirties, so he got elected and he’s popular. Even if he wasn’t all that popular, you know incumbents tend to stay in, so he’ll be there for twenty years, and they’ll say, “Anthony Weiner has been here for really a long time, maybe we should make him chair of something.” That’s not exactly how it works, but seniority is so important in terms of getting those leadership positions, whether its majority leader or chairman of a committee, it’s so important to have marked that time. Women tend to run for office much much later in life then men, they have their families. So many women who I try to talk into running will say, “I’ve got young children, I couldn’t possibly run. They have their families, they often have a first career, and then when they are in their fifties, they think, “Maybe I should run for office now.”

The problem is that then they’re at a great disadvantage, in terms of getting into leadership, just because they’re not there as long as the men are. It is daunting to try to do things the way we’re doing it, but I think we think that the outcome is so important. I think it’s not just women, I mainly deal with women, but I think that most men that I talk to think that political system would be a better place, or maybe the country would be a better place if you had more of a diversity of opinion in the leadership. Men and women do think differently, people who are forty and people who are twenty do think differently, and if you have more opinions coming into decisions that it will be better for everybody.

Andrea Schmitt: Hi, I’m Andrea and I as wondering if you’ve ever been discouraged by the problems that you have.

Susannah Shakow: I think I have been discouraged, we have board meetings once a month, and often we will talk about all the discouraging things that will happen. It’s difficult for us to raise money, and I think that’s our primary frustration. It’s frustrating not to be able to find these republican candidates so we can look as bipartisan as we actually are, but what when we get discouraged about these things, we are sitting around debating what we do about them. If everything was always going great I don’ think you would think about ways to do things better and different, we’re always building upon what we have and we’re always thinking of new ideas, and better ways to make everything work. That comes out of being a little discouraged, I think. If you were just happy and everything was going along beautifully, I don’ know if we’d have as much creative juices flowing to actually improve things. So, discouraged but good in the end.

Sadanand Maillard: As long as you don’t give up, right?

Susannah Shakow: Yeah, well so far, I actually just met with the whole board a couple weeks ago individually to make sure everything was going great. Nobody has given up yet.

Kristin Van’t-Rood: My name is Kristin. Is there a support network for young women in Congress?

Susannah Shakow: Oh, well that is interesting. The interesting thing is that I think there is an informal support network, right now there are no senators, I guess there are some forty-something senators, but there are these four young women who are under forty and then there are a lot that are forty one or forty five that are close to it. we had an event last may where we had Congresswomen who had young families come in to talk about how they could do it, because, like I say, that’s the number one thing when I talk to candidates to try to recruit them they say, “Well, I’ve got t family.” We brought in these Congresswomen who did have families, and talk about how they made it all work. Because, of course, the Congresswoman is in their district on the weekends but they are in DC away from their families during the week, they all live together.

There is a group house with Debbie Wasserman Schulz, and Melissa Bean, and, I can’t remember who else, but there are four women and they sit around, they get in their pajamas, and they watch TV, and eat popcorn, after hours, and talk about what happened during the day. I think that is a nice support network, I like the fact that they are living together, and the Sanchez sisters, Loretta and Linda Sanchez, who both were elected under forty, I don’t know if they’re still living together, but they were living together. In terms of an institutional support for them, there is a thirty-something on the house side, I think it’s probably just the democrats, but all of the thirty-something members get together and they are given time after the business of the day is over, and I keep meaning to watch this and I’ll tell you, I have not actually been on CSPAN at eight o’clock at night recently, but they floor time to talk about whatever they want. I think it is a leadership initiative to get the young people, give them more of a chance to speak. You all should look at CSPAN if you are ever so inclined, and see after the seven o’clock, eight o’clock, there should be a whole group of thirty-something’s on there talking about different issues.

Emily Crubaugh: I’m Emily. Did you ever have any particularly inspirational mentors that helped you get to where you are now?

Susannah Shakow: I did, and Madeline Albright said in a book that I read, that there is a special place reserved in hell for women who don’t help women. I think that that goes beyond just women; I think it is so wrong for people who have gotten to an interesting position and done well in their lives, not to look over their shoulder and help people who are coming up. Everybody I know has certain mentors in their life, people who it just seems like their success is a threat to the people that they work for. I’ve had a lot of just great mentors, women who, for the most part, believed in me. WUFPAC actually does a lot of mentorship programs where we, like during the summer we hook up interns who are in DC to professional women in their same field, or the field they want to be in. We do programs like that just because it’s so important to have people help each other. I hope you all get good mentors.

Sadanand Maillard: Inez McCormick, who is recognized by Vital Voices, she was the first woman president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. She was in town one day, and Alyse got her for us. One of kids asked her a similar question, and she said as a young woman in a private school, when you move forward and you don’t reach in to the space and pull someone into the space behind you, you’re going to be just like all the other leaders that went before. It seems like a very powerful message that’s coming out of the women’s leadership about mentoring.

Susannah Shakow: I’ll tell you, there’s a very bad stereotype that I hear often, which is that women don’t help women, that women are not good bosses, and that women are good to the people they work with, and that’s just something we shouldn’t allow. You’re not a strong group unless everybody is helping, each part.

Daniel Nanas: Hi, I’m Daniel. We’ve met several women, such as Melanne and Alyse Nelson, who, like yourself, work for the advancement of other people in politics. I found that many women leaders have a tendency to work in collaborative and supportive roles, as opposed to taking leadership positions in the spot light. Do you think that there is a way that women are raised in our society that leads them into supportive rather then leading roles, and how can women use the asset of being collaborative workers and still serve in needed national leadership positions?

Susannah Shakow: God, what a good question, and a hard question too. I think that for a long time women weren’t expected to be the leaders, look at so many other countries, women are expected to be in the background and not to be in the limelight. I think that’s really changing in America, I’m sure everybody at this table feels that you could be a leader, if that’s what you choose, you certainly have the ability to get there. I think that there are some things that are holding women back, and I do talk to people a lot who say, “I’m very happy helping somebody become whatever, Congresswoman, but I don’t want to do it myself.” I think, actually, one thing that might play in to that, and I don’t know what the answer to this is, that it goes back to the whole children thing.

I’ve got six year old twin boys, so I’ve dealt with this my whole life. It’s very hard for people to figure out how to do what you want to do professionally when you have children. It’s hard, and it takes a lot of flexibility and juggling. I think that a lot of women still think that they don’t want to deal with the hassle, that they want to stay in the background so they can have that time with their family, that they can be the mother and not take away from that. I do think that is  factor for women, I think the more role models you see of women who are fabulous mothers, who also have a great professional career, and who are leaders, I think that’ s what helps. There’s a woman in Congress right now, Debbie Wasserman Schulz, from Florida, and she’s thirty seven, and she has twins who are six, and she’s got a two year old, or maybe a there year old. I’ve talked to her a lot about how she has made it work, she actually decided to run for Congress a month before having her baby, I think that’s what it was, yes a month before having her baby she decided to run for Congress. She’s the perfect example of somebody who you think, “She’s just crazy to have tried this, campaigning with a new born baby, and the first meeting I had with her was at this fancy restaurant, and all I knew was that she was this up and coming candidate, I didn’t know much about her personal life, and she shows up with her mother, and a baby in a little car seat carrier to this fancy restaurant, because she was breastfeeding she had to bring the baby.

I think it’s all about role models, really for all of this I think it’s all about role models. You just have see how it’s done, and a lot women are afraid to be in leadership roles because they are worried about the job, or the responsibilities of that, taking away from other important parts of their life. There are so many other factors, but that’s one I think people don’t talk about much.

Kendra Froshman: Do you think the flipside of that is now that paternity leave is becoming a bigger thing, and just men having a bigger role with kids?

Susannah Shakow: You can’t do it without a supportive husband. My husband, I feel like I shouldn’t even say this in this building, but I think he’s the very first person at this firm to take paternity leave. It’s still a controversial thing, but I don’t think you can do it. As a woman, I don’t think you can have a professional career that is interesting and going places if you don’t have a supportive husband who takes a lot of the slack. It’s interesting that it doesn’t seem to really go both ways, that it’s much easier for men to have a family and to do whatever they want to do, but women feel, in my experience, so much more responsibility for taking care of the kids or the housework or whatever, and that is something that has to change. Women have to stop feeling as much responsibility and learn how to share it with their husbands too.

Madeline Weston-Miles: Hi, I’m Madeline. How can I be the kind of person somebody will want to mentor?

Susannah Shakow: Oh, what a good question! I think part of it is choosing the person you want to mentor you. I’ve had times in my life where I’ve gone into a job, and seen, “That’s somebody who I’d love to pay attention to me.” There was a person in my law firm, a woman who was actually a really intimidating person, but she was so interesting and so involved with so many things. I kind of chose her, and it worked in the end. I was very interested in her life; I was very willing to do whatever she wanted. She’d ask me to work on a project, and I’d always be very willing to help her however she wanted. I think choosing is the most important thing. You choose that person and let it be known that you’re very interested in that person, and that you want to be there to help them, and they will reciprocate, hopefully.

Megan Mitchell: Hi, I’m Megan. Have you noticed a pressure on women coming into Congress not to advance women’s issue based platforms, and in other words, are women in Congress forced to play by other people’s rules?

Susannah Shakow: I think that is what we would expect. If you were going in as a young Congresswoman, you don’t want to be typecasted as “Oh, she only deals with women’s issues.” I’m sure that a lot of people think that, and it’s really interested to look at Hilary Clinton right now, because she is positioning herself, obviously, but she has dug into all of the men’s issues. National security, and all of this defense stuff. She has moved so far away from the traditional women’s issues, so yeah, I think there is a fair amount of that. It’s so interesting that even though we might expect that, that women would be wary of typecasting themselves, there’s this professor at Georgetown University, who went back and she took four years of Congress, and she look at the voting records of all the members of Congress in the House during that four year period. She wrote a list of all of the bills that were introduced those years, and the ones that were women’s bills, ones that helped women, or helped children, the one’s you would think would be the soft issue bills that would help education, or whatever, 99% of those bills were introduced by women. Her conclusion was that it was the women and it had nothing to do with party; it was just if you were a woman, and you were going to be the one pushing this type of legislation.

Kay Bailey Hutchison has a quote that says, “It’s not that men don’t care about these issues, it’s just that they had honestly not thought about how this was a problem.” Women, we have different concerns and different cares in our lives, and so there are just certain things that we might see as a problem that our male counterparts in Congress don’t. It was really interesting for me too see that, and too see that if you’re a woman and you want to vote for somebody that is going to push your agenda, whatever that agenda is, the woman’s side of your agenda is how I should say it, then you might be better served to vote for a woman republican then a democratic man, because it’s more likely that she’ll be introducing bills that affect a part of your life directly.

John-Nuri Vissell: Hi, I’m John. We work on getting women into politics, but is there also an importance on getting politics to young women? As in high school programs that come in and introduce the attention and idealism of young women in politics?

Susannah Shakow: You know, there isn’t really. Right now what we do is we do events where we invite a lot of young people to hear interesting political speakers talk about cool things, which we think they might be interested in. We have a program that we are trying to work out with the charter schools in the area, where we’ll come in and actually bring one of the young Congresswomen in, and not necessarily just Congresswomen, but we’re also talking about bringing in young candidates who are running, just to act as role models, to do exactly what you we’re saying, to say, “I don’t look so different from you, I’m running for Congress or I’m in Congress and this is how I did it, just to inspire them. That is a big component of it, and I know there are a fair number of other groups who do that sort of thing, but we think that especially bringing in the young Congresswomen will be a great thing because there’s so few of them, and it’s so different for a young girl, especially in the inner city in DC, to be able to see these role models who really made it happen. That is an important part of what we do now, but especially what we plan on doing.

Todd Wilson: My name is Todd. Based on what you were saying with Megan’s question, it seems that bringing more women into Congress won’t necessarily pass more legislation on women’s issues, so what I’m wondering is how much you think one’s personal identity affects your ability to represent the identity of others.

Susannah Shakow: Well I often, when speaking to a male politician, I often get a lot of hostility. I was speaking to the mayor of Salt Lake City, which is kind of random, and I was telling him about WUFPAC, and he was genuinely offended with what we were doing, because he said, “I have a wife, I have daughters, and I can’t believe you think that I wouldn’t represent their issues just as well as anybody else, because I love them and I care about them.” I think it really goes back to the idea that it’s not that these male politicians don’t care; it’s that I think sometimes people do vote on their experience. They vote on the issues that affect their lives most personally, and so I think it’s just that there are some issues that are gender issues, that women are going to be more aware of or men are going to be more aware of. It helps to have both points of view at the table. You all know ’92 was the year of the woman, it was the year we got the most women into Congress ever in history, and some people are saying this is year is going to be the same, so it will be interesting.

After ’92 a whole lot of really big women-related bills got passed, it really was that all these women suddenly started talking about, “Hey, why has nobody ever done his?” I think one of them is kind of controversial, ‘Family and Medical Leave Act,’ where they allow people to take of time to help a sick child, or a sick parent, or I suppose themselves too, but it’s mandated time off. That just had never been around before ’92, and a lot people say it’s because all these women came in and they often had to leave their jobs to go care for the sick child or the sick parent. Breast cancer funding was another big one, prostate cancer had gotten a whole lot of money and breast cancer hadn’t gotten as much money, and all these women came in and said, “We need to have some parenting.”

Sadanand Maillard: It’s interesting, you’re bringing forward something that, as an educator and someone at home doing innovation and education, it’s very easy to go to the negative said and say it’s wrong. All that does is set up the opposition. The thing that has occurred to me, especially in the last few years, where we’ve been doing conferences on the innovation and education, is to understand that it’s not wrong, it’s just incomplete. If we can have more diversity in the room, we have that greater breadth of perspective.

Susannah Shakow: It’s all about that, perspective.

Sadanand Maillard: I’m trying to figure out, and I think you probably are too, is how you promote change without the shadow side of the resistance. I think the first step is not to make the other guys wrong. I’m hearing you say that, and that really makes lot of sense.

Susannah Shakow: Hopefully, because a lot is threatening about trying to get young women into office is threatening to some people.

Sadanand Maillard: How do you disarm people before they get to the ‘being threatened’ stage?

Susannah Shakow: Well obviously with the mayor I didn’t do a good job.

Sadanand Maillard: That’s one of those things that will promote your next genius, how to do it differently next time.

Susannah Shakow: We do talk about, especially talking to older men who tend to be the most skeptical about the idea, that if they do have daughters just saying, “Don’t you want to see more women role models, women leaders that they can model themselves after?” It’s really true for me at least; it’s hard to imagine doing a job that you don’t see anybody like you in. It may be a strange thing; I think it is Emily’s List that says, you can’t be what you can’t see. I do think that if you look back in your lives, if there are only men doing one sport, maybe it wouldn’t occur to women to try that sport. I think it really is important to have that.

Sadanand Maillard: Martha Nussbaum said something about that. Anybody remember it? She’s a philosopher, in Greek philosophy. She said something about how you only desire what’s in our framework; you only desire what you see.

Susannah Shakow: Stephanie Herseth, the young Congresswomen from South Dakota, she’s the first women they’ve ever sent to Congress. She’s the first women who’s run in a very long time, and she was saying she would go to these state fairs, which is a lot of what she did when she was campaigning, and that she was mobbed by middle school age girls, she was just a rock start to them because they had no idea that a woman, and she’s a very young looking woman, that somebody who looked like their babysitter could run for Congress. They would all go ask their moms, “I could do this too?” It’s important to see those people out there.

Daniel Nanas: This relates to Margaret Wheatley. She said we define ourselves by what we choose to notice, when we notice what is around us and what we do.

Xander Crawford: As a male—

Susannah Shakow: Let’s hope.

Xander Crawford: As a male, I am a man. Is there anything that I can do, aside from giving money to support equal representation in Congress?

Susannah Shakow: We have a lot of men who are our members, and are very supportive of what we do because it’s not just women who are noticing this problem. Men, for example in law firms, only fifteen percent of partner’s nation wide are women. In Fortune 500 companies, I can’t remember the astonishingly low number, but it’s like three women are CEO’s. Men notice that there are women missing at the top, and do want to help make it more even. Women are equal to you in all ways in high school and college, and then when you get out there comes a time when you realize, “Wow, something has happened, and there’s not as many women in leaderships or high positions as there should be. I’m sure it’s as disturbing to men, really, as it is to women. I would encourage you to get involved in groups. Emily’s List has lots of men working for them contributing to them, and it’s very important, I think, to put your money where your mouth is and support causes that do, maybe it looks like a woman’s group, but to show your support that way.

Sadanand Maillard: They get to hang out with the power women, too.

Susannah Shakow: I’ll tell you something else, too. I have some single male friends who just love going to WUFPAC events because it’s just all young women. I thought that they just liked me, but that was what it was.

Kendra Froshman: I think that a lot of young people are frustrated right now that they see in dialogue, maybe with other leaders around them, they don’t see it as a dialogue, maybe more as a monologue, or something like this. How do you do WUFPAC or generally a strategy to listen to young people?

Susannah Shakow: I think that young people say that “I’m not going to vote because it’s not going to matter, nobody ever talks about the issues that we care about, so why does it even matte if I get involved?” But of course, I know that you all know that politicians don’t pay any attention to people who don’ vote, or give money, or get involved. Ads about political issues aren’t aimed at you guys, not at all. They know you don’t really care, you guys care, I’m sure, but many of your peers don’t care, so they tend to focus on older people because they know that they give money, and they will be out thee voting, and that they truly care. I think that encouraging as many people as you know to get out there and vote.

To give five dollars to a political candidate, just choose somebody, educate on who is running and who is out there, because nothing is going to change. The youth will never have a voice unless you ask for it, and people have not been asking for it. Back in the last election there was an enormous push to get youth out to vote, and the youth vote did rise a lot, but we could do so much better. Just telling people over and over again, of course it’s not interesting to you right now, of course they’re not focusing on your issues, but it’s up to you to knock on that door and to ask, and to make them pay attention to you, which they will if you vote. Voting is the first step, you’ve vote and then giving money and getting involved in campaigns is nice too, and running yourself is especially nice.

Sadanand Maillard: I know we’re almost at the end of our time, but we have a traditional closer that we’ll go to, but I want to do a bit of lobbying for these guys, and that is you brought up several points that really dovetail into that last question. One is that we need to be listening more; we need to be more of a learning culture, because we have a lot to learn from countries around the world. We’ve seen it in our classroom, people I bring in from Africa, for example, have taught us more about what it means to be human, and because they haven’t necessarily had their lives interrupted by all the things that take us away from who we really are in the pace of life. There’s one idea that we need to get into the process and get our ideas heard, there’s this other idea of preparing the next generation to assume leadership. There’s always idea that if you somehow listen to us and learn what we know, then eventually you’ll be at the point where you are capable of doing something. My observation is that if we actually listen to them now, they’ll tell us how we’re doing, and if we want people to mentor people in the process, we have to give them a seat at the table. One of the things that I advocate for is, in the political process, not just saying “Here we are, and if you’re smart enough to figure it out,” but to bring them to the table, bring them to these fundraising events, make sure there are young people at the table when we’re doing business, because that’s the best form of mentoring.

Susannah Shakow: I definitely think so too. And I think what you’re saying is not just mentoring, it won’t be just that you all will absorb what’s going on, but that you’ll have a different, fresh perspective.

Sadanand Maillard: And some institutional memory about why it went the way it did, and yet I see that as a missing piece in the system. A connection of the generations, which I think is something that the indigenous know that we’ve forgotten.

Susannah Shakow: Do you all have internships that you do during the summer, or the school year? I grew up in DC so I had it easy, but I always had an internship. In DC you mainly work for free, which seems so ridiculous, but the experience you get of being right there, wherever it is, I mean White House internships are amazing. Hard to get, but you guys are smart, you could get one. Internships are just a wonderful way to get your foot in the door and really see what a place is like.

Sadanand Maillard: Kendra is a graduate of the program, she graduated seven years ago.

Kendra Froshman: I was working for non-profit in DC.

Susannah Shakow: Which one?

Kendra Froshman: It’s called the Fellowship of reconciliation. It’s based in New York, but there’s a satellite here.

Susannah Shakow: What does it do?

Kendra Froshman: I was working on the Middle East programs, so we were sending delegations to Israel and Palestine, and then to Iran to learn about he situation there and then educate.

Susannah Shakow: I’d love to talk to you more about that, it sounds great.

Kendra Froshman: It was very interesting.

Susannah Shakow: Are you still in DC?

Sadanand Maillard: She came home to us. I had three interns here last year, one for Congresswoman Matsui, one in Vital Voices, and then Kendra was finishing up her tour of the Middle East.

Susannah Shakow: That’s great, well WUFPAC is always looking for interns, too. We’re small, so we have about for or five interns, but if any of you all want to apply.

Sadanand Maillard: Jonji, you want to do the closer?

Jonji Barber: As our teacher said, this is question that we ask at the end of every interview. It varies from time to time, but as our generation develops and grows into this adult world that we’re all facing, now, is there any advice that you think would make the process more meaningful?

Susannah Shakow: I don’t know if this is exactly the advice you were asking for, we were just talking about being a good mentor and looking over your shoulder and bringing people up, but I think there are some people who think that you have to be, that there is no place for niceness. There are some people who think that niceness is weakness. The people that know that do the best over a long period of time in their careers; they are people who understand the value of treating other people well. This might seem like such a basic lesson, but I’ve see it so many times. People, like when I started at my law firm, people treating their secretaries like dirt because the secretaries were not at the same level as they were, or not wanting to mentor somebody because they felt they were too important and they didn’t have time to have lunch with somebody who wasn’t going to give them anything. I just think that it’s so important in your lives to realize that being nice, it’s such an asset because you win friends, and you make great networks, and being the type of person who thinks they are too self-important, I mean DC is full of those people, frankly, people who think they are so important they can’t bother with the niceties of life. The truth is, it’s extremely important. That’s my advice, thank you.

In 1986, Moyers formed Public Affairs Television, Inc., with his wife and work partner, Judith. Their independent production company has created more than 300 hours of programming, including Bill Moyers: In Search of the Constitution (1987), Moyers: God and Politics (1987), Bill Moyers’ World of Ideas (1988), and Moyers: The Power of the Word (1989). Mr. Moyers is also responsible for Bill Moyers Reports, in-depth programs that focus on a variety of subjects, such as addiction, alternative medicine, and poetry. In 2002, he launched NOW with Bill Moyers, a weekly show dealing with current events. Throughout his career, Moyers has interviewed a diverse group of people, from academics such as Harvard professor Tu Wei-ming, to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Moyers has been recognized for his work with more than 30 Emmy Awards. In addition, he is also a best-selling author. Many people know of Bill Moyers through his landmark series The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell and his innovative series on death and dying, On Our Own Terms.

New York, May 2003

Moyers: Well, I welcome you here and I’m glad to meet your teacher Ward. We’ve corresponded, and I could tell this was a teacher who was not content to take the knowledge that was in the books and just regurgitate it to his students. I could see that he had his classes involved in the world beyond Mount Madonna. He used our work more brilliantly than anyone has used it.

At my small organization , we pride ourselves on the fact that we don’t simply produce television. We believe that television without legs has only lungs; it can speak, but it can’t travel. If you take television and turn it into educational tool, if you try to show that beyond the images on the screen, there’s a reality that young people can engage with, then television serves a double purpose. It both informs the viewers who are watching and transports the people who want to follow up on it to a different place and a different mind and a different idea. No one has done that better than your teacher, and I’m so glad to meet you in person.

Mr. Mailliard: I want to introduce one of the first graduates out of my program, PK Diffenbaugh. He went on to Stanford and got his Master’s there. He was selected as a Coro Fellow and now he’s talking about coming back to graduate school here in New York.

PK Diffenbaugh: It’s just such an honor to be able to be here, and when I reflect upon my life, I can see a crossroads even as young as I am, in high school, dealing with adolescence and dealing with the tremendous amount of change that’s going on. And it was your interviews and Ward’s teaching that really helped me find a sense of purpose and the notion that there is a community outside yourself and outside your immediate relations, and that a worthy purpose in life is to pursue your goals, but also to give back to that community.

I doubt if you ever question if your work has made a difference, because it has, but if you ever do, I hope you know what a tremendous impact it has had on all the students that go through Mount Madonna.

Well, I appreciate that. The truth is that while I have an intuition, I don’t know for certain that it’s made a difference unless I hear from the people to whom it has signified. I think teachers don’t leave books on the shelves. They don’t leave monuments like architects do. All they have is the indelible mark that they leave on somebody who understood, appropriated and acted on what they heard or read from that teacher. We journalists are like teachers in a sense; we write on the wind and scribble in the sand. And the wind blows and it’s gone, and the sand moves and it disappears. It’s only in the imprint that you leave on somebody else’s life that a teacher knows he or she has signified.

I do not believe in monologues. I do not believe in filibusters. I do not want to dominate. I want to do what you want to do today.

Student: Margaret Wheatley, author of A Simpler Way wrote that “we create ourselves by what we choose to notice.” She goes on to say that “We can never direct a living system; we can only disturb it. We can nudge, titillate or provoke one another into new ways of seeing.” Does this in any way describe what you’re trying to do for our society with your work?

Moyers: I certainly would agree that it’s a consequence of what I do. Essentially I do what I do because it engages me. But I think usually it’s not what you notice, but what notices you. In some indescribable way there are ideas, there are certainly people, there are experiences, there are moments, there are encounters that shine their attention on you. I got my first job in journalism because my teacher in the 10th grade noticed that I had a certain facility, not so much for writing, but for listening, and for seeing details.

In a way she (Margaret Wheatley) is right in this sense. I have a classroom in television, and what I notice I can say to others, “Hey, pay attention, you too may be interested in this. This grabbed me.” Some book inspires me to want to talk to the author, or some incident compels me to want to do a story about it and find out the “why” behind what I have read. Once I do it, I’m able to put it in a forum that has an invisible audience out there that responds to it. I do believe that’s what life is all about, that it’s a constant interlocking of experience and ideas and personalities.

Something close to what Margaret Wheatley said has been something of a mandate of mine. The editor of the first newspaper in America was a man named Benjamin Harris. He published a newspaper in Boston called, Public Occurrences both Foreign and Domestic. And he said that his mandate was “to give an account of such considerable things as have come to my attention.” That’s what I do as a journalist. Considerable things come to my attention, and then I’m able to act on them and transpose them into a form of storytelling, a visual medium. I’m not a writer, I work with pictures, and there’s no greater revelatory picture than a human face. That’s why I do so many interviews, with these production values as we call it in our business, to give an account of these “considerable things,” and then hope that they touch other people who would never go there otherwise.

The root definition of television is ‘vision from afar.’  TV brings something to us that we might not go to ourselves. Then if it provokes us to get up off the couch or up out of the chair and go out into the world, then it has served its purpose. So, yes, I do resonate with what she’s saying, though I’d never thought about it that way.

Student: I was really inspired by your interview with Jacob Needleman. And when he said “meaning can come from the search for meaning,” and “questioning makes one open, makes one humble,” It made me want to engage in more thoughtful questions. And I was thinking that this is a good description of what you do, questioning, and I’m curious to know if the Needleman interview and the other interviews you have done have impacted you in a great way like that.

Moyers: I just did a six-hour series called Becoming American: The Chinese Experience in America. In that series, I interviewed a young woman named Michelle Ling. She’s 30 years old and a Chinese American, a graduate of Berkeley School of Journalism in fact, and she represents to me the quintessential American. When I started out to do this series, I wanted to find out, “What does it mean to be an American?” “What is different about this society, other than the material consumption, which is extraordinary?” When do you know that you’ve become an American if you’re from a Scottish background, as I am, or a Hispanic background or Greek or Vietnamese?

Michelle Ling answered it for me. She’s in the last part of the last documentary and we’re talking about her life and she tells me about how she likes to eat Chinese chicken feet. Not very pretty, not very attractive, but if you like that kind of delicacy, quite scintillating. She describes this to me in rich vernacular. And I asked her, “But what does that have to do with the American dream?” And she says, “It is the American dream–that I can eat chicken feet, but I don’t have to. Nobody is forcing me to and that’s not my only option, so I can eat at McDonald’s if I want to.”

Then she goes on to make the transition to a very powerful point. In America, if we are fortunate, we have the power to invent ourselves, to compose our own life. How do we compose that life? It is by what we’re exposed to and the choices we make of the possibilities that often and usually unintentionally open to us. We make a choice in the same way that a composer takes this note and puts it with that note and hears the sound in his head and moves to the next note, composing a piece of music. So we compose our lives. Your life will be different because you chose to come to New York this week. Who knows how it will be different? Who knows what tiny grain in outer space can deflect a missile or a meteor moving through the universe? So can a life be deflected by a bump that you don’t even feel at the moment. Choices put you in the trajectory of bumps you may never know about until you become a certain way, make a certain choice, emerge as a certain person.

Student: One of the areas of your work I was very interested in was your poetry series. I read your book, Fooling with Words, and you quoted Stanley Kuntiz as saying, “Poetry explores the depth of thought and feeling that civilization requires for survival.” I’m wondering what you think the relevance of poets is in our society today, because it seems they are not as prominent as they used to be. And I was also wondering if your work in the poetry series was an attempt to get people to acknowledge them more.

Moyers: Poets are not appreciated; poetry is. Poets are not appreciated because they don’t make money and our society usually celebrates people who make money. Essentially, our society is about the celebration of individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and success. Poets are not about money. Because they are not about money, and because there is no market value placed on their poetry, they are free to speak the truth. They are free to say what they believe because they know there’s not a price tag on it. If they start writing for the market, they’re not writing from the heart. So they speak the truth all of us need to know. In journalism I call it the truth beyond the news.

The poets are trying to get at the truth of the human experience that comes from some very deep source and some keen way of seeing the world. They want you to know it whether or not you can pay for it. So I have a real passion to offer poets’ work to the public. We don’t get large audiences when we do that, but we get a deeply engaged and committed audience, who are appreciative of the chance to hear a poet.

Student: Martha Nussbaum said in an interview with you, “If you go into a situation with some fixed abstract principles and you think of the situation just as a scene for plugging in the principles, you very often are not going to see the new challenge and the characteristics of the person before you that you might have otherwise noticed.” She went on to say, “Aristotle’s directive is to think of yourself as though you were improvising.” He compares this idea to what a good navigator might do. In our preparation for an interview, we struggle a lot to plan and create a clear picture for our questions and at the same time seek improvisation and spontaneity. We were wondering how you navigate through those two things.

Moyers: That’s a very good question. There are always two interviews. There is the interview that the person with whom I’m talking wants to do, and there’s the interview I want to come out of the conversation.

An interview is a dance. It is a dance on which the success depends upon acknowledging your partner, going with your partner, and then bringing your partner back to the rhythm that you hear, which is slightly different from the rhythm in her ear. It’s like in every good dance there is what Martha Nussbaum calls “the principles.” I call it the music. When two parties are dancing to the music or when two parties are having a conversation based upon different principles, you nonetheless, by improvising, come to a place where both of you are happy with the results. I’ve never interviewed anyone who has not been happy with the results, even though they were surprised by what they heard when they watched.

I think the real phenomenon of life is change, is transition, and that everything else is background noise, everything–politics, the economy, education. Everything in our life is background noise to the fundamental reality that from the moment we emerge from the passion of our parents, and out of the womb into the world, and on through the rest of life; dust to dust and ashes to ashes, we’re in constant change. Everything else is background music and we compose our symphony, our music as we go along. That’s why you can have what Martha Nussbaum calls strong abstract ideas, or principles, but you always have to be responding to the world as it is. The challenge of an ethical life, I believe, is to respond to the world from your principles so that you remain true to who you are even though you’re dancing to music that you didn’t compose. To hold to your principles while responding to change, flux, transition, is the measure of an ethical mind.

Student: We were watching your interview with Paul Woodruff, and it sparked a conversation about why today’s youth are disenchanted by or shying away from traditional religion. Derek Wolcott says, “If you are stuck on a moral center, what you want to do is give lectures and to give sermons.” That made me think that the reason that we as youth are turning away from traditional religion is because we feel it is too much of a lecture and we are wanting more of a dialogue around religion. I know that you’ve talked to many thoughtful people about religion and I was just wondering what you think.

Moyers: Do you mind sharing with me your own religious journey, your own religious interest at the moment?

Student: Well, I’m Methodist and I am not sure what I believe in right now and I don’t think I’ve fully found it in the Methodist church. I don’t feel I have been fully able to interpret the message of the Methodist church as well as I’d like.

Moyers: And how old are you?

Student: Sixteen.

Moyers: You’re sixteen; I’m fifty-some odd years older than you and I haven’t found it yet, although I came out of a culture quite like the Methodists. In fact there were more Methodists and Baptists in the little town where I grew up than there were people. I started out as you have where the church organizes itself around a set of beliefs, “I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost,”so that religion becomes a series of assertions, a series of beliefs.

There are some people who in the midst of crisis or in the midst of frustration, or despair simply cannot wrestle themselves through to an insight that is comforting, encouraging, inspiriting, and they cling to what they have been told that sounds good. My father was very much that way, particularly after the death of my brother in 1966 at the age of 39. My older brother, my only brother, my only sibling, was really my father’s favorite and he died of cancer, and I don’t think my father would have survived if the church hadn’t given him such phrases as “in my father’s house there are many mansions” or “Jesus said I am the way, the truth and the life.” Those were anchors to which my father could fasten his grief in a way that without exploring or without answering, gave him comfort and consolation, so I have a great deal of sympathy for people who cling to propositions, to assertions, to bumper stickers if you will.

But they get arrested there, and because they get arrested there, they never explore the deeper spiritual discoveries that are there for somebody who is open to experience. I said to Joseph Campbell in the series of interviews that I did, “Are you a man of faith?” And he said, “I don’t need faith. I have experience. I have experience in the discovery of a personal sense of the divinity in the universe that cannot be labeled, cannot be sculptured, cannot be marketed. It is an experience that you discover as you open yourself up.”

One of my favorite interviews in on this Friday night on NOW with the religious scholar Elaine Pagels. She’s just out now with a new book, The Gospel of Thomas: Beyond Belief. The Gospel of Thomas was discovered in 1945 by a Bedouin boy who was out in the desert. He went into a cave and found these jars of ancient documents, going back a thousand years, which we now know were written in and around and just after the time of Jesus. Thomas allegedly was Jesus’ brother They are called “The Secret Sayings of Jesus.” Sayings like this for example, “If you bring out what is in you, what is in you will save you. If you do not bring out what is in you, what you do not bring out will destroy you.” Nobody knows what that means. They are like koans, like dilemmas in life with which you have to wrestle.

Well, Elaine Pagels joined an evangelical church, it may have been a Methodist church, when she was fourteen and a year later, she lost her best friend in a tragic accident. And she went back to that church and she heard people saying, “Well, isn’t it a shame he wasn’t born again, so he’s gone to hell.” She said, “I couldn’t accept that and I left the church.” So she went out into a life of the intellect; she became one of the leading scholars of religion. You saw her in “World of Ideas.”

Elaine Pagels lost a son, her only son, at age 16 months. Then two years later, her husband fell in a climbing accident in the Rockies and was killed. All of her beliefs were again shattered. First her beliefs had been shattered when her friend died, and she was told he’d gone to hell, and then her beliefs were shattered by the losing of her only son and the losing of her husband. And she said, “No proposition, no assertion of belief, would give me the consolation I needed. I had to find it in the Gospel of Thomas” which was not put in the official gospel because an Archbishop read it and said, “If you go this way, you don’t need the church,” and so he had it burned. But somebody didn’t burn it; the monks in Egypt hid it. Elaine Pagels gives the best articulation of the difference between ‘belief,’ which is, “I believe in this” and faith, which is in fact casting yourself into the experience and letting it shape you. Only by doing that, only by letting go, can you really learn to swim, and only by moving beyond the assertions you’ve been taught, to the experience of learning from your own experience can you really find that. So I think your generation is on a very good search.

Student: I’m curious. You’ve interviewed so many people of different cultural beliefs and religions. How have those interviews personally affected your faith?

Moyers: They have drawn me further into the adventure, the learning experience, the openness, the questing, the willingness to compose out of all that I’ve heard, what is seems to me to be a readable document for my life. Some people dismiss this as ‘cafeteria religion,’ you know going through the cafeteria line and taking a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and I don’t believe that at all. I think that is in fact what we have to do, back to the earlier question of inventing our lives, composing our lives, dealing with principle while also greeting the experience that comes to us unexpected. Most of life comes to us unexpected, and so it’s kept me on a constant vigil for what seems to me pertinent to my experience, that seems to fit where I am at that particular moment.

When I was at the University of Texas, I had a wonderful anthropology professor, Gilbert McAllister, who spent his formative years working among the Apaches in West Texas. And one of the important things I remember learning from Professor McAllister was that the Apaches had one word for grandfather and for grandson. There was just one word. And the word means “interlocking”  or “reciprocity.” The idea the Apaches were trying to suggest was that the generations have an obligation to each other; that a grandfather has to reach back and link to the grandson and they form a kind of DNA chain, a continuity of life and experience. In time the grandson, by looking out for the elders of the society, will reciprocate. So it was a lesson of reciprocity and I think that is what life is about. My generation has a reciprocal obligation to yours, to share with you what we have learned, what has come to our attention, and then you have obligation to our generation to carry on the civil threads of continuity to the next generation.

Student: When we went to Washington, DC last year to interview different people in the government, we asked them all a similar question which was, “How can we make America more of a learning culture than a teaching culture?”

Moyers: In a culture, a society, that is so filled with propaganda, in which everybody has a spin on things, it’s very hard to develop the capacity for learning, which is the capacity for listening, the capacity for growing in response to what you listen to, the rejecting of what you think isn’t valid for your life and accepting what is, and weaving it into the fabric of your own destiny. I don’t have an answer to that question of how we move from a teaching culture where everybody has something to tell somebody else, to move from a propaganda culture to where we have developed this capacity to learning. Obviously, without flattering you, I think that’s what you all are doing. You’re trying to create a learning culture in your life, where you receive, assess and weigh and organize what you hear. How we do that on a mass scale? How we do that in larger schools, or publicly funded schools where the kids have to bring all the unfinished business of home and street to the classroom? I don’t know. And how we do that in a society where money has become the chief measure of politics? I don’t know. This is one our generation hasn’t figured out, and perhaps yours will.

America is a society that thinks it has answers, and if you have answers, you want to give them to you class, your congregation, your readers or your audience. Learning really requires asking questions and we’re not very patient in America with questions, because we think we already know the answer. This is my problem with both left-wing ideology and right-wing ideology. They think that they have the answers, and so why do they need to have a learning culture, when we can just give you the answers, and you appropriate them and go and do likewise. It is frustrating.

In my own journey, people always say, “Moyers is a political liberal,” and people mean different things by that, for example that I believe in government progress. That’s not it at all, although I do believe in certain government progress. But for me, a liberal never accepts anything he hears from any authority uncritically. That means the church, that means the party, that means the government and that means the university. Any authority has its own ingrained goal and set of values, and it wants you to see the world through those goals and through that frame of values. Now they may be worthy and they may not be, but what makes us a truly thinking person is to understand that there’s a value in what you hear, but to never accept uncritically anything you hear from any authority. Because authority by its very name presupposes an investment of credibility that needs to be challenged before you accept it. And I think that ultimately creates a learner. A learner is someone who is willing to resist the temptation to accept uncritically what authority tells you. Now you can’t reject it altogether, because then you have a society of anarchy, but you need to really examine the propositions that are presented to you from the people who are trying to teach you.

PK Diffenbough: I’d like to ask you a question about your interviews with Joseph Campbell. Each time I watch them, it seems that I learn something new, but perhaps more importantly I realize that there’s so much more that I don’t know. It moves me to search. He talked about the need for America to create a “modern myth.” You pressed him about how could we do this, and it seemed that he said “It’s too hard in our fast paced society; we’re moving too fast to create new myths.” It seems that September 11th, at least for a brief moment, America stopped to reflect. I’m wondering what opportunities you feel September 11th has given us to recreate ourselves? Which leaders do you see taking advantage of those opportunities?

Moyers: When Joseph Campbell talked about myth, he meant, “What is the truth that people live by?” We need to arrive at a new truth for America, a new narrative, a new story about America. The old story doesn’t work any more. It was a story that was never resolved. Here was a nation born in liberty and yet cradling slavery in its birthplace. We never reconciled those irreconcilable differences between the Declaration of Independence and the reality of slavery. The proclamation of our abstract ideas or our basic truths with the reality of how we, both north and south, were exploiting the labor of others. We covered it up. The Civil War was a great renting of that mythology, and yet after the Civil War, in practical ways, we didn’t learn the lesson; we were not a learning culture, to go back to the earlier question.

9/11 gave us the chance once again to learn that we’re not invincible, that we’re not isolated, that we are in the world, in dangerous ways, and how do we connect to the world in a way that enables us to write a new narrative of America as part of the world, not apart from the world. And I see sketches of that, I see drafts of that being done in one book or another book. Others are doing the same thing. But, no one as yet has struck a note, which offers a common resonance to people. Bush has gone to “It’s us versus the world.” and “We must act militarily in order to defend ourselves,” and that has put the rest of the world on the defensive. We haven’t found the new story.

PK Diffenbough: How did you experience 9/11 personally?

Moyers: I did the only thing I know how to do and that’s work. My wife runs our production company as my co-executive editor, we live about a mile north of here, 75th and Central Park West, and I was dressing at 8:44 and she came in and said, “There’s been a plane that hit the World Trade Center. I thought immediately that some Piper Cub had wandered off course, or some neurotic individual had lost control of himself and flown into it. And we got into a cab 10 minutes later and in the cab heard about the second, and both of us knew instantly, as everybody else did, that this was a plan, a plot, an attack of some kind.

And we came down to the office. Our tower, the station’s tower, was atop the World Trade Center so we didn’t have our signal except a small back-up generator in New Jersey. And it took a while to get those generators out there up to full speed, so we were off the air for 24 hours except for a small signal to a certain number of places in the city on cable. So later in the afternoon PBS called and said, “We want to go on the air tomorrow with a nightly broadcast, beyond News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Would you just take 8:00 in the evening and talk to anybody you want to talk to about this? Anybody.”

So we started the next night; we were up then, we had a signal we could beam to PBS and they could deliver it to the country. I reached out first of all to my pastor. I go to the Riverside Cathedral up on the West Side. It’s a great church founded by the Rockefellers, a great progressive church. It is now pastored by one of the great ecumenists of our time, an African-American minister named James Forbes, one of the most powerful minds and divines in the country. I had him come for the first 15 minutes.

I asked James, “What are going to preach about on Sunday?” And he said, “I’m going to try to answer the question I think my congregation will be asking.” And I asked, “What is that question you think they’ll be asking?” He said, “Oh, I think they’ll come saying ‘Why should we be here?’” And he did. I went to that service and in fact it was so powerful that I called PBS and said we should do an ecumenical service based in this church, and we did a PBS broadcast. It was quite a moving experience. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, all kinds of people were there with music of different religions. It was a very powerful service.

Then I had Bill T. Jones, the African-American choreographer. I did a documentary about him a few years ago called “Still/Here” because Bill Jones is HIV positive and he’s been giving himself to seminars around the country in which dying people come to learn to dance their grief, to dance as a form of healing even in the face of dying. And I said to Bill T. Jones, “What did you do Tuesday night?” And he said, “I danced. I was alone in my apartment.” He said, “I stood up and I danced.” Then he stood and started moving; he’s a graceful man, a man of immense expression, and then he stopped and he said, “I would urge anybody at home who is feeling paralyzed and lonely and in agony to dance.” My own 37-year-old son told me later, “Dad, I was watching that.”

My own 37-year-old son alone in his apartment in his townhouse on A Street got up and danced! Movement is very often an amelioration of trauma and so what I did was to work. That’s my dance; that’s my response; that’s my political act. And I’ve long been fortunate to be able to ground my needs in my work, so I worked at that time. That was my personal response.

Student: What brought about the transition from your work inside the White House to doing interviews like the ones you did with Joseph Campbell, and what is it about Joseph Campbell that inspired you to delve so deeply into his work and ideas?

Moyers: Well, I’ve had a checkered life. For all the improvisation, and contingency of it, there has been a common theme. I knew when I was 15 that I wanted to be a journalist, and I went to work on June 5, 1952 on the local newspaper in my hometown. And a series of unexpected events led me on a circuitous route, that wound up with my working for the Kennedy-Johnson administration in the campaign of 1960 and in the Peace Corps for three years. Then I was in Texas at the time of the (Kennedy) assassination, came back on the new President Johnson’s plane and was for four years one of his closest associates.

But I never lost that unspeakable interest in journalism. I was White House Press Secretary for a period of 17 months and I kept thinking as I was conducting briefings at the White House, being asked questions, that I should be on the other side of the desk, asking the questions, not answering them. It goes back again to the question about teaching or learning.

Then an opportunity came up quite unexpectedly to become publisher of a newspaper in New York. How it happened, and again this is “who notices you” not “what you notice.” The owner of this newspaper, watching my briefings, took a liking to me. He was an older man, 80 years old he needed help, and for some reason thought that he and I would connect. I actually was looking forward to leaving the White House and getting back into journalism, so I came to new York to publish the paper. I published the paper for 3 years, and then it was sold. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Again, being noticed, an old friend of mine I hadn’t seen him in years was editing Harper’s Magazine. He called me up and said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “I don’t know; I’m out of work.” And he said, “Why don’t you go on the road? Spend three months traveling the country, and I’ll give you the cover of the magazine, and we’ll call it Listening to America. And we did. If you look at Harper’s Magazine, November 1970, you’ll see the back of a bus, with Moyers as the license plate and the title of the piece called “Listening to America.” They turned that into a book, it became a best seller.

After that somebody at the old educational television station at 304 W. 56th in New York, called Channel 13 at that time, noticed me, noticed that article. They were starting a weekly broadcast called “This Week” and they needed a reporting host, so they reached out and asked me to do it. I hadn’t done television except the briefings at the White House but I said, “Yes,” on the spur of the moment. It was a weekly half-hour broadcast with produced reports and in the second season. I wasn’t very good in the first season; I was stiff, formal, still had on horn-rimmed glasses. I was still “Mr. Official” as I had been at the White House. And I said, “This is not for me; I’m not going to make it in television, but by God I’m not going to quit after a failed season.” So I said I’ll come back for one more year. I changed the name of the program to “Bill Moyers Journal.”

We ran out of money and I brought in a new executive producer, who had been the manager of the NBC Symphony when it was at its height. He was given to artistic issues. So he was sitting in front of my desk and we were trying to think how do we do inexpensive shows and finish this season on budget. He said, “You know, I’ve noticed that you listen to people well. I don’t know why that is, I could discuss that a little later, but you know, I’m looking over your shoulder, and I’m seeing a book by Barbara Tuchman.” Barbara Tuchman was one of the great historians of my time, and he said, “She lives over on Park Avenue. Why don’t we go interview her?” So I called her up and she said, “Sure.” And we took two clumsy old cameras, because we shot on film then, not on tape, we shot on film, and had to run the big wires the size of your body up the building and we did that interview and we put it on the air, and it clicked. It worked, got a great response. I liked doing it and I just kept doing it.

Joseph Campbell was not a particularly compelling figure for me. I had heard of him, read his book, “The Hero’s Journey” at the University of Texas. He taught 38 years at Sarah Lawrence, and he held his classes mesmerized by his teaching. He was a charismatic teacher; he believed in the sharing experience, and that’s what came through in the series. That’s a long-winded answer to your question is to say that there wasn’t any guided missile that lead me to Joseph Campbell. It was a life’s process, of being both open, unlucky–losing a job, losing a newspaper, and lucky–somebody noticing me.

Campbell was a great teacher and he taught me several things. One of which is that when you leap very often the universe responds with invisible hands that catch you and transfer you, transform your life, turn you in a different direction. That happened to me at a series of points. It wasn’t any great epiphany. There was no moment of revelation, no “aha,” no “Eureka!” but there was just a series of changes that were the result of my moving in this direction and somebody else moving me slightly in another direction.

And by the way, I don’t just do interviews; I’ve done actually as many documentaries and produced pieces as I have interviews. Somehow it’s the interviews that seem to engage people in a more enduring way. I believe that the best production value in television is a human face–the eyes, the eyebrows, the voice–and people love to listen to other people who have something to say. Now, they also love to listen to people who don’t have anything to say, or we wouldn’t have celebrity journalism with all these interviews with celebrities who never say anything, but one of the reasons I’ve done what I’ve done is that people who have nothing to say get the most airtime in America, whether it’s politicians or celebrities. The people who really have things to say, like Tu Wei-ming and Joseph Campbell and Barbara Tuchman and Martha Nussbaum, rarely get television time. Yet they can take you into a kingdom of thought that is so unexplored as to rivet you when you’re exposed to it, and that’s why I’ve kept doing it, even as I’ve kept doing documentaries.

Student: How does your experience in the White House during the Vietnam War affect your views on government, how it works or doesn’t work, and how does it affect your views on military action as a useful government tool?

Moyers: I learned less about government than I did about our society. It drove me back to a kind of journalism that I’ve been trying to practice. You know, I said earlier “news is what someone wants to keep hidden and all the rest is advertising.” I grew up in the South. The South I grew up in was still a deeply racist, segregated society, where people were in denial about race and slavery. Of course in the 1820′s and 1830′s and 1840′s and 50′s, anybody who tried to speak the truth about slavery was driven from the classroom, driven from the news room, driven from the pulpit. Southerners entered a kind of mass denial about slavery.

Politics failed because you can’t have effective democratic politics when people are in denial and we had to go to war to settle the issue of slavery. Then it took another hundred years because we really worked out the consequences of that war. In the Vietnam War, we drew our wagons together in a circle, we stopped listening to others, as we had done in the South, and both ended in tragedy. The denial of truth in the 1850′s to the Civil War, and the denial of reality in Southeast Asia to the Vietnam War. So that more than anything else, my White House experience has informed my journalism. I think it’s made me a better journalist than I would have been otherwise. It’s made me, as I said earlier, more critical of authority, not to take things that you’re told on face value, so it’s had that very powerful effect on my journalism.

Student: We were watching your series on addiction, and you interviewed a family in which the parents were addicted to drugs, and when I was watching that, I felt really angry at the parents and upset that they put their children in that kind of situation. And I was wondering if you have strong emotional reactions to the subjects that you cover, and how do you balance your own feelings with the responsibility to present that information impartially?

Moyers: That, too, is a good question and it’s not easy to answer. I do sometimes have very strong reactions and yet I am there not to react but to report. I am always responding emotionally, but I’m always trying not to pretend to be impartial. There are professional skills I bring to my work, and one of them is never to be surprised. Or if you are surprised, never to show that you’re surprised or you’ll lose the story. So yes, I get angry, and I used to get angry at people who are addicted, at alcoholics, until my own son turned out to be one.

That series was done because I had a 30-year-old son, a brilliant journalist in his own right, married, upstanding citizen, promising young man, and at 30 he disappeared. My wife found him in a crack house in Harlem, got him out, then he relapsed a second time and we almost lost him, and then the third time he relapsed, I had to spend 5 days searching for him, and finally found him in a crack house in Atlanta, and with policemen with their guns drawn, we went in and got him out. This time, treatment worked. That was 12 years ago. He’s vice-president of Hazelton, the rehabilitation center where he got his treatment. What I learned in that experience is that addiction is a disease. You don’t get angry at somebody if they have cancer or malaria or HIV. You don’t get angry at them because they’ve got a disease.

That’s why I began that series with the first hour called “The Hijacked Brain,”  because chemicals change your brain. And they change your brain so that if you have a tendency to addiction, if your genes and chromosomes react to want more, then sooner than later, the chemical changes in your brain affect your behavior and you’re no longer responsible for it. You don’t get angry at the person, you get angry at the disease. That’s what I learned from my 10 year experience with my son, and that’s what we tried patiently to explain in that first hour, through the use of neuroscientists and science. We try to explain how the brain is hijacked by chemicals, whether alcohol or whatever. Why is it, I can have two drinks and stop; I never want more than 2 drinks. My son can’t have one and stop. So, his responsibility in the face of his disease is never to have that drink; that’s the meaning of sobriety and recovery. He says he just says no, and he does, because he knows that if he has just one beer even, he’s gone again, and for 12 years he’s been able to exercise that responsibility. So I do have to try to understand who they are and why they are in order not to get angry with them.

Student: Michael Josephson said in his interview with you, “The most moving moment was having a child. When I compare how I was approaching teaching ethics to the law students with how I wanted to teach my son ethics and what I wanted him to be, I saw an enormous inconsistency.” We know that your son affected your work quite a bit, but in what other ways has it affected your approach and also the choice of subject matter that you’ve shown to the public?

Moyers: Well, having a family has saved me from a toxic absorption with myself. It is very hard to put yourself first when you have four other people whose needs are equal to yours. The tendency to egoism is very powerful in our society, and it’s never more pronounced than it is when you’re on a public stage as I am. Having a family has provided me the empathy to see that other people’s needs are often quite more important than mine. So it’s kept a balance in my life. And I think it has affected many of the subjects that I’ve dealt with, such as addiction, and we did a wonderful documentary on a family’s first effort to establish adoption for a foster children’s program. I’ve done a number of things because of my experience as a father and a husband and a parent. Even my grandchildren save me from self-absorption, just because they are so indifferent to my public notoriety. And because they don’t even watch my television shows. One night, a long time ago, 25 years ago, the show was airing on Thursday night, you know I do the show and then go out and film for the next week’s show. I was traveling and was in the train station and I looked around and thought, “Look at all the people who are not watching my show.” That’s a constantly humbling reality.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom I’m sure you all have studied, said that “All of life is transference; it’s not creativity. Nothing is original, it is transference and we humans live out our destiny that way. We dive and reappear.”  And I think that is true. I think ultimately it is all about a moral transaction. America is essentially a material transaction. You take $10 and you want to buy something; you want to get something of value. I think on the level of the moral exchange, that is also true, that when people sit and watch my program for an hour, they are giving me something the will never get back which is an hour of their lives. It is irreplaceable. It has been spent, and I owe them something of moral value in exchange.

I feel the same way about a gathering like this; you’ve given me two hours of your life, and you will never get those two hours back; they are gone. You spent them this way, and if there’s no investment, you’ve wasted them. And only time will tell, but I feel deeply as I know any teacher does, and I know as you do, that it is a moral exchange. If you spend two hours with somebody, you both have to take something away from it.

I assure you I take a lot of value away from this, the reassurance to an old man that, when he leaves the field, he’s not leaving it empty. That there are a lot of others he’ll never know, lives he’ll never see unfold, names he will never remember who are out there carrying on what I call the great transaction of democracy, and I wish all of you well.