UFW’S TERESA
ROMERO ON FARM WORKERS
ECONOMIC FORECAST
GLORIA DUFFY ON PALM SPRINGS
October 3-18, 2023
Marvel at the incredible wildlife and wonders of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana. From colorful Cape Town to Victoria Falls, historic Soweto to Robben Island, every moment of this 12-night journey will inspire. Experience famous safari destinations: Chobe National Park, Hwange National Park and Kapama Private Game Reserve. Plus, enjoy three nights aboard the opulent Rovos Rail.
from $8,295, per person, based on double occupancy
10 Uncovering the Real George P. Shultz cover story: Biographer Philip Taubman shares what he learned about the former secretary of state.
26 The Walter E. Hoadley
Annual Economic Forecast
Maurice Obstfeld and Michael Boskin talk with Ann E. Harrison about what they see happening to the economy in 2023.
34 Representative Jackie Speier: The Exit Interview
The Bay Area congresswoman talks with Melissa Caen on the occasion of her retirement from the House of Representatives.
42 Teresa Romero
The United Farm Workers union leader describes the need for more laws—and enforcement of laws already on the books.
ON THE COVER: George P. Shultz. (Official State Department photo.)
ON THIS PAGE: Top:
Speier.
Jackie (Photo by Ed Ritger.) Right: Teresa Romero. (Photo by Ed Ritger.)“Kids know when another kid has a gun or has the potential to shoot; they hear about it. That’s why these community officers are actually helpful to have on school campuses, because the kids are more likely to go and tell them.“
—JACKIE SPEIER
“For the first time in decades, farm workers who chose to stand up for their rights will at least be in a fair fight— without the union election process rigged against them.“
—TERESA ROMERO
April/May 2023
Volume 117, Number 2
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Those of you who have been to our headquarters on the waterfront know that the entire front face of the building is glass. This allows for incredible views of the bay and the Bay Bridge from the upper floors. And on the ground floor, of course, you get a full view of pedestrians on the sidewalk outside.
Not too long ago, I was sitting at the front desk, helping out with check-in for a program, when I noticed four people out on the street. They were acting like sightseers—you know, pointing at things in the distance, taking photos. Then they seemed to notice the Club’s building, and I assumed they had heard us on the radio in whatever city they lived in. Eventually, they came to the door to see if they could come in, and I let them in.
Why were they there? It turns out the daughter of one of the couples was an architect who worked on our building. In particular, the staircase from the first to second floors was designed by her. “That’s her staircase!” one of them said. The proud parents took pictures in front of the staircase and left.
someone who appeared on the Club stage many times as a speaker or moderator was the late George P. Shultz. He and his wife, Charlotte, were not only longtime and vocal supporters of the Club, they helped us many times during the multi-year effort to raise money, including hosting a meeting of donors at their home in the city, and they spoke at our groundbreaking ceremony and helped with advice during the long permitting process.
It’s not to much to say they were invaluable to us; they were supporters of the Club’s mission and willing to roll up their sleeves to get involved in keeping this cultural institution going.
Our cover story this issue focuses on George Shultz’s legacy, as told by biographer Philip Taubman. As you’ll see in the article that stretches across 11 pages, Taubman reveals previously unknown or little-known facts about Shultz’s life, including getting him to talk about some of the most painful moments of his career, from Watergate to Theranos. But those moments pale in comparison to his work to wind down the Cold War, reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons, and even confront bigotry.
Shultz was a legend, so I hope you’ll read the extended excerpt from the Taubman program and share my appreciation that there have been and still are people who dedicate themselves to making the world a better place, even when things seem uncertain.
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Four decades ago, Cesar Chavez, leader of the United Farm Workers, gave what became one of the most famous speeches ever delivered to The Commonwealth Club of California.
Marc Grossman, UFW spokesperson, tells us that Chavez’s Club speech has been widely shared, and excerpts from it are etched in marble and metal gracing monuments honoring Chavez across the nation; excerpts are also included in exhibitions and tributes to Chavez, who died in 1993.
As his successor at the UFW, Teresa Romero, relates in her own Club speech elsewhere in this issue of The Commonwealth, Chavez was initially reluctant to accept the invitation to speak from Club President Shirley Temple Black. Black was a well-known conservative Republican; why would she want to feature a left-wing labor activist on the Club’s stage?
But, as Romero relates, Black was a strong supporter of unions, having been a member of one since her days as a world-famous child actor. She and Chavez got along wonderfully, and in the process one of the most important speeches about labor rights and civil rights was given right here in the Bay Area.
In his 1984 speech, Chavez said, “For nearly
20 years, our union has been on the cutting edge of a people’s cause, and you cannot do away with an entire people and you cannot stamp out a people’s cause. Regardless of what the future holds for the union, regardless of what the future holds for farm workers, our accomplishments cannot be undone. . . . The consciousness and pride that were raised by our union are alive and thriving inside millions of
young Hispanics who will never work on a farm.”
As you’ll see when you read Romero’s powerful speech, the UFW has notched quite a few victories since 1984, but it still has a lot of issues it is addressing to ensure often basic human rights and labor rights for farm workers.
To learn more about the United Farm Workers, visit ufw.org.
Board Chair
Martha C. Ryan
Vice Chair
John L. Boland Secretary
TBD
Treasurer
John R. Farmer
President & CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy
BOARD OF GOVERNORS
PAST BOARD CHAIRS & PRESIDENTS
* Past Chair
** Past President
Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman*
J. Dennis Bonney**
Maryles Casto*
Hon. Ming Chin**
Mary B. Cranston*
Evelyn Dilsaver*
Joseph I. Epstein**
Robert E. Adams
Willie Adams
Deborah Alvarez-Rodriguez
Scott Anderson
Dan Ashley
Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman
David Chun
Charles M. Collins
Mary B. Cranston
Susie Cranston
Claudine Cheng
Dr. Kerry P. Curtis
Dorian Daley
Evelyn Dilsaver
Joseph I. Epstein
Jeffrey A. Farber
Dr. Carol A. Fleming
Leslie Saul Garvin
Gerald Harris
Peter Hill
Mary Huss
Michael Isip
Nora James
Dr. Robert Lee Kilpatrick
Alexis Krivkovich
David Leimsieder
Dr. Mary Marcy
Lenny Mendonca
Michelle Meow
Anna W.M. Mok
DJ Patil
Ken Petrilla
Skip Rhodes
Bill Ring
George M. Scalise
George D. Smith Jr.
David Spencer
James Strother
Hon. Tad Taube
Charles Travers
Don Wen
Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox
Brenda Wright
Mark Zitter
John Farmer*
Rose Guilbault*
Claude B. Hutchison Jr.**
Anna W.M. Mok*
Richard Otter**
Joseph Perrelli**
Toni Rembe**
Victor J. Revenko**
Skip Rhodes**
Renée Rubin**
Richard Rubin*
Connie Shapiro**
Nelson Weller**
Judith Wilbur**
Dennis Wu**
Karin Helene Bauer
Hon. William Bradley
Dennise M. Carter
Steven Falk
Amy Gershoni
Jacquelyn Hadley
Heather Kitchen
Amy McCombs
Don J. McGrath
Hon. William J. Perry
Hon. Barbara Pivnicka
Hon. Richard Pivnicka
Nancy Thompson
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We look forward to seeing you soon in-person at one of the discussions, wine tastings, jazz performances or other great reasons to gather with others in your Commonwealth Club community.
Philip Taubman on
BIOGRAPHER PHILIP TAUBMAN DRAWS ON GEORGE SHULTZ’S PERSONAL PAPERS to shed new light on how Shultz helped shape U.S. foreign policy at a crucial time in world history. From the January 31, 2023, program “Philip Taubman on George P. Shultz: The Life and Legacy of a Great Statesman.” This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.
PHILIP TAUBMAN, Lecturer, Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation; Former Reporter and Editor, The New York Times; Author, In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz
In Conversation with DAVID KENNEDY, Professor Emeritus of American History, Stanford University; Former Director, Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West
DAVID KENNEDY: Philip is here to discuss . . . George Shultz’s long career in public service at the Bureau of the Budget—later the Office of Management and Budget—secretary of labor, secretary of the treasury and eventually secretary of state. One of only two people, if my memory serves, who have held that many cabinet or cabinet-equivalent positions. And after he left formal government service, he also had a major role to play in an effort to reduce or even eliminate nuclear weapons.
Let me begin with what might be a little bit of an embarrassing note, Phil. I have to say I found this book to be uncommonly interesting and not just because it’s an interesting subject, namely George Shultz, but I was really in many points in awe of the extent and depth of your research and the felicity of your writing.
So let’s begin with you. Where were you born? Where you raised? What was your educational formation? What was your career? And what was the pathway that led you to this particular project?
PHILIP TAUBMAN: Thank you for those kind words, David. Coming from you, that means a lot.
I’m a New York kid. I grew up in Manhattan, went to high school there, came out here to Stanford University as an undergraduate. When I put my luggage down in my freshman dorm, the first place I headed was the offices of the Stanford Daily, because I wanted to be a journalist.
That was probably because my father was a journalist, worked at The New York Times for 40-plus years as a music critic and a drama critic. I got the bug traveling around the world with him. So I did go into journalism, first at Time magazine and then a brief period at Esquire and then eventually The New York Times, and increasingly got drawn into reporting about national security affairs.
That’s where I first met George Shultz, when he was secretary of state and I was helping to cover the State Department for The New York Times Washington bureau. And that began a relationship with him that was kind of suspended after he left office in early ’89. I observed him in the Washington bureau, and then I moved to the Moscow bureau of the Times. In those days, he was traveling back and forth once Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader. So I observed him there. We played tennis a few times—
KENNEDY: Who won?
TAUBMAN: Well, that’s a good question [laughter], because the first time was when his aide told me to bring a racket on the next trip, and we found ourselves in Rio. One afternoon and I got a call up in my hotel room and [they] said the secretary would like to play tennis. So off we went to the tennis court. We’re volleying, and I’m thinking to myself, Am I allowed to beat the secretary of state? [Laughter.] So it turned out he was a very steady player, like the man himself. But at any rate, I was in Moscow. He left office. I came back, and when we sort of fell out of touch, what actually led to this book project was the prior book that I did on Shultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn and Sidney Drell down at Stanford and their effort to eliminate nuclear weapons. It was during the course of doing that book that Shultz said to me one day, “Would you be interested in writing my biography?”
KENNEDY: What was the title of the book
you did on those five?
TAUBMAN: The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb
KENNEDY: Another excellent book, by the way. So crucial points in your own career and Shultz’s overlap and gave you insight not only to the world of Washington, D.C., where you were bureau chief, I’m not mistaken.
TAUBMAN: Eventually, in Washington bureau chief at the Times. Correct.
KENNEDY: And you were bureau chief in Moscow as well. So did that give you any particular perspective on the U.S.-Russian relationship?
TAUBMAN: Oh, absolutely. Here were the two superpowers, and I had the privilege of writing about the Cold War, first from Washington and then from Moscow. And I think when I got to Moscow with my wife, Felicity Barringer, who at the time had been working for The Washington Post, we were both struck very quickly by how depressed the Soviet economy was. It was a centrally planned economy. It was sputtering when we got there. A huge investment was being made in the defense for the Kremlin. And it became clear after a month or six weeks that the Soviet Union was really a developing country with nuclear weapons. So that helped me understand the Cold War in a way I would not have before.
I think that helped me understand something that became important for Shultz and Reagan and then figures prominently in the book, which was one of the motivations for
Mikhail Gorbachev to wind down the Cold War was that he understood, unlike his predecessors, that the Soviet economy could not sustain that kind of military expenditure and provide any kind of consumer goods for the Soviet citizens.
KENNEDY: So let’s say that we could revive George Shultz and bring him into the room here. Make us understand him as a human being. What made him tick? What was his own formation? What was he like? What kind of guy was he?
TAUBMAN: The George Shultz I knew turned out to be several different people and in a way that had less probably to do with him than the perspective I had on him. So when you’re covering the secretary of state as a reporter for The New York Times, you’re kept at a distance. You’re traveling around the world with the secretary, but your access is limited and it’s very much controlled. What you’re seeing is the persona that the State Department and the secretary want to project. And that persona of George Shultz was a very reserved person. Very few words, tried not to make news when he was talking to reporters. His nickname around the State Department in those days was the Sphinx, because he was so quiet. And he was a good listener, but he was not a gregarious person.
Fast forward to the time I’m dealing with him for the research for the book [and he] seemed like an entirely different person. Gregarious, outgoing, fun loving. I think this was clearly partly a function when you’re secretary
of state, you keep a certain demeanor. His first wife had died by the time I renewed my relationship with him. His first wife, Obie, was a wonderful, thoughtful, but very quiet and modest person.
When he remarried—and people in San Francisco will know his second wife very well, Charlotte. She was the chief of protocol for San Francisco and the state of California. And nobody knew how to throw a party better than Charlotte. And so George adopted this kind of party-loving mode that Charlotte presented. And the second George Shultz I met was a very playful person, like to joke around, dance, sing. So when you ask the question, I have to answer in the sense that I saw him transition from this very reserved figure to this very outgoing figure.
KENNEDY: You make me recollect, when he came back to Stanford after leaving office, among many other occasions that he organized was a reception for Eduard Shevardnadze. To honor Shevardnadze on that occasion, George got up and sang a cappella, “Sweet Georgia Brown.” [Laughter.] It was awful. It was just terrible singing. But that was a side of him that you wouldn’t have seen when he was [at the State Department].
TAUBMAN: But actually, it turned out he did exactly that when he was secretary of state. To talk a little bit about Shultz as a diplomat: He wanted to establish a rapport with the people that he was dealing with. It was almost impossible to establish rapport with Andrei Gromyko, the longstanding Soviet foreign
minister, who was this implacable, belligerent figure. Once he was replaced by Eduard Shevardnadze, who came from Georgia—it’s not on the Mediterranean, but the people of Georgia are kind of a Mediterranean people. They’re warm, friendly. They love to have dinner parties, drink their wine and their cognac. And Schultz developed this wonderful relationship with Shevardnadze, which, actually, when you go back and look at the end of the Cold War, it was that relationship between the two foreign ministers that was, I think, almost as important as the relationship between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
So at one point when they were negotiating at the height of the Cold War, he did exactly that with Shevardnadze. He arranged this lunch where he sang “Georgia on My Mind.” They did a version in Russian, and Shevardnadze loved it.
KENNEDY: I wish I had heard that; that would have been memorable.
Before he entered government service, he had another career as an academic and as an economist at MIT. He taught there for a while, then went to Chicago. Tell us a little something about the academic side of his career.
TAUBMAN: Shultz always thought of himself as an academic.
He’d been a marine in World War II in the
Pacific theater, was involved in combat. He came back, took up an admission that had been approved before he went off to the war to do graduate work at MIT in economics, got his Ph.D. there, became an assistant professor there.
Interestingly, one of the courses he took was with Paul Samuelson at MIT, who was a young rising star in economics.
KENNEDY: And a Keynesian.
TAUBMAN: Yes, a Keynesian. And because it was the postwar period, George Shultz took a course from Paul Samuelson. It was just George Shultz and one other student in the course. Talk about a seminar. Wow. That’s amazing.
So he then moves to Chicago and Milton Friedman and the whole Chicago School of Economics, which is free market economics. He became a disciple of free market economics. I tried to get him to explain to me later in life, and he never really gave me a satisfactory answer, how he had moved from taking Paul Samuelson’s course and thinking the world of Paul Samuelson and then ends up at Chicago, being the sort of opposite of a Keynesian economist.
KENNEDY: The Chicago school is famously anti-Keynesian. But he was unable to explain adequately to you how he made that intellectual [switch].
TAUBMAN: You know, I think he was persuaded. It’s interesting to think back. During the Depression, George was a young man and Franklin Roosevelt [was president]. All the efforts that FDR made to revive the American economy during the Depression, which I think most Americans looked at and thought he was making progress and doing the right thing—not George Shultz. As a young man, he looked out at the American economy and came to the opposite conclusion, which was that for all FDR was doing, it wasn’t working. So at that point, in the 1930s, he became a Republican. He became convinced that government intervention in the economy was essentially a bad idea, and he carried that through to his dying day. He remained very much a member and leading light of the Chicago School of Economics.
KENNEDY: And he thought that anyone who believed otherwise wasn’t a true economist.
TAUBMAN: Exactly.
KENNEDY: Richard Nixon is the person who first elevates him into significant public office. If I’m not mistaken, he appointed [Shultz to] his first three cabinet posts at OMB, Labor and Treasury. So tell us a little bit about his career there in the Nixon administration.
TAUBMAN: It’s interesting. Shultz made a name for himself as a labor economist. And then after a number of years as dean of the University of Chicago Business School, he took a sabbatical [and] came out here. This was his first contact with Stanford Universi-
ty, The Center for Advanced Studies. They introduced him to his office in the foothills overlooking the campus. And he looks in his office. There’s no telephone. He goes to the director and he says, “What’s up? I use the telephone all the time. There’s no phone in my office.” And the director says, “No, we do not have phones in offices here. I think you’ll come to find that you like that.” And he did.
But he did get a call from Richard Nixon— must have been in the main office. Nixon, who was campaigning for president, invited him to provide some advice. His mentor and connection to Nixon, interestingly, was Arthur Burns, who later became chairman of the Federal Reserve. George Shultz had gone to Washington in 1955 to work on the staff at the Council of Economic Advisors in the Eisenhower White House, and the chairman of the council was Arthur Burns. That’s where their relationship began. Nixon’s elected in ’68, and he invites Shultz to come be his secretary of labor.
Shultz goes down to L.A. to meet with the president-elect, and he finds Nixon to be a kind of odd duck, in a way. He’s there, he thinks, being interviewed for this job, even though it’s already been offered. But he figures Nixon wants to figure out exactly what kind of labor secretary are you going to be. It turned out, according to Shultz, that Nixon seemed very insecure during the interview and he always remembered that interestingly. So he becomes secretary of labor. The day comes when he is announcing all the subcabinet officials in his department. There’s a
news conference in New York, I think it was. He goes down the list, he announces seven or eight people. Not a single one of them is a Republican. They’re all Democrats or independents. It had never occurred to him because he was not a particularly political figure, that when you’re staffing up in a Republican administration, the expectation is that you’re going to appoint Republicans.
So he got a angry phone call from a Nixon aide after that, essentially saying, “George, what the hell are you doing? You know, you’re appointing all these Democrats.”
Secretary of labor—his greatest achievement and most people don’t even know about this, was that George Shultz led a task force in the Nixon administration to desegregate urban public school systems in the South. When they started that project, less than 25 percent of the urban school systems in the southern states were desegregated. By the time they finished, 75 percent were. So this was an amazing achievement by George Shultz that has kind of been lost to history, because he became famous as secretary of state.
KENNEDY: Somewhat better known is the Philadelphia Plan, also an initiative in the same direction.
TAUBMAN: Exactly. He helped to desegregate the trade unions—the plumbers, electricians and all of those unions, which were mostly occupied by white men in those days. George Shultz believed in civil rights. He believed in equality. He wasn’t a fervent believer. You know, Martin Luther King was leading marches in Chicago when he was a
dean at the University of Chicago. He wasn’t out there marching. But what he did do was to shake up the University of Chicago admissions process so that they could bring in more people of color to the business school. Then he did this effort with the building trades and then with the southern school systems.
KENNEDY: You tell a touching story about a trip he made to Fort Worth, Texas, in 1962 and a confrontation in the hotel lobby over a black person trying to get a room.
TAUBMAN: At this point, the meatpacking industry was going through a huge transformation. Historically, the stockyards had been based in places like Kansas City and Chicago, and the cattle had been driven to them from the farms where they were raised. The industry figured out this was not very efficient and that they should disperse the stockyards out closer to the places where the cows were being raised, which required an upheaval.
The union was a heavily Black union at the time in places like Chicago and Kansas City. And they were threatened by this because the workforce out closer to the farms was not going to be predominantly black. So George was brought in to help figure out how to make this transformation without costing a lot of jobs to Black union members. So he shows up in Fort Worth that day with his aide from the University of Chicago—
KENNEDY: This is when he’s dean?
TAUBMAN: —he’s dean—and a Black union representative. They arrive at the hotel desk and they check in, and the clerk checks in George Schultz, checks in his aide. They
get to the Black union leader, “I’m sorry. We don’t have a reservation for you.”
So Schultz says, “What do you mean? We made reservations for three people.”
“We’re sorry, Mr. Schultz. We don’t have a reservation.”
So he says to them, “Check your records.” They come back out. They said, “We don’t have a reservation. He says, “Put them in my room. There are two beds.” They go back and they consult again and they find a room.
That was a wonderful kind of courageous thing, a human thing for George Schultz to do.
KENNEDY: But as you say, he wasn’t conspicuous in the public eye.
TAUBMAN: He was not a fervent advocate of civil rights, but he quietly did things that advanced the interests of people of color in the United States.
KENNEDY: What about while he was at Treasury in the next administration? Any landmark accomplishments there?
TAUBMAN: Well, there is a landmark accomplishment that we all still enjoy today, which was the exchange rate for international currencies when he became treasury secretary was pegged to the dollar, which was pegged to the price of American gold reserves at Fort Knox, $35 an ounce. It was unsustainable, because dollars were circulating in far greater
amounts than gold reserves were available to back them up.
Nixon realized they had to do something drastic, and he asked Schultz to design a new exchange rate system, which George did. So the floating exchange rate system, which still exists to this day, was basically his creation.
KENNEDY: How did he get along with Nixon personally?
TAUBMAN: Good and bad relations. He thought Nixon was doing good things domestically. And in fact, when you go back and look at the Nixon administration, the Environmental Protection Agency was created by Richard Nixon. Nixon was progressive on some domestic issues. He got involved in the desegregation issue because he realized that the Supreme Court had mandated this. But Nixon also, of course, was responsible for the Watergate burglary and the coverup and the Watergate scandal. George got drawn into this himself in a way that he didn’t want to talk about.
KENNEDY: Not even to you.
TAUBMAN: No. People remember that John Dean, the White House counsel, went to the IRS in this period and presented them with a list of dozens of names of Nixon’s enemies. John Dean said to the IRS commissioner, a South Carolina gentleman named Johnnie Walters, “We want the IRS to investigate
all of these people.” Walters was offended. He went to the treasury secretary, George Shultz, who agreed they put the list in a safe. Shultz instructed Walters “If John Dean calls you back, tell them to call me.”
So that’s great. But what he didn’t want to talk about was that Nixon leaned on him to have the IRS investigate Larry O’Brien. You may remember why the Watergate burglary took place—to break into the offices of Larry O’Brien, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Nixon believed O’Brien was a very effective political operative for the Democratic Party. He wanted the IRS to find tax problems for Larry O’Brien. And sadly, George Schultz condoned that. The IRS went into a frenzy of investigating Larry O’Brien for his connection to Howard Hughes, the billionaire, who was holed up in the top floor of his Las Vegas hotel, because he feared that if he met anyone outside his hotel suite, he would get sick.
So George condoned that. The records of these were found by a wonderful research assistant I had at Stanford. And when I sat down with George to look at all the records of the special prosecutor of Watergate that detailed all of this, he looked stricken. I was actually concerned he might have a heart attack in the interview, because he was so upset to have us ask him about this.
I would say, looking back at his record as secretary of treasury on economic issues, he accomplished a lot, but he got drawn into Watergate in a way that he should not have.
KENNEDY: You write that he was the last of
the Nixon appointees to resign, which I don’t think is quite right. I think Kissinger stayed to the end, I believe.
TAUBMAN: Right. But he stayed in the Nixon cabinet. Kissinger started as the national security advisor. So Shultz was the last person appointed to the Nixon cabinet initially who stayed.
KENNEDY: Yeah. And you think he had some regrets about [that].
TAUBMAN: Well, he told Arthur Burns he should leave. If you go back, one of the wonderful things about doing research for a project like this is you find all this historical material. And lo and behold, Arthur Burns did a memoir and kept a diary. I think most people didn’t realize that. I certainly didn’t. There in his diary, he has entries talking about his private conversations with the treasury secretary, George Shultz. And Shultz is confiding in him that Nixon is deeply involved in Watergate. It’s criminal conduct. He’s uncomfortable working for Nixon, but he won’t quit. He didn’t quit until May of ’74. Nixon resigned in August of ’74. He stayed. He stayed too long.
KENNEDY: There’s a pattern here, it seems to me, reading your book, that he on several occasions threatened to resign over the Nixon administration, the Reagan administration, but never did. He stays on even when things are starting to look a little shady. But we’ll get to that, because it’s another part of the story that really comes [into] better focus a little bit later.
Let’s let’s move to what I suppose is his
most famous and consequential period of service, which was as secretary of state in the Reagan administration. You commenced that discussion with a nice, concise history of the state of the Cold War at that moment. You rest a lot of the argument on national security decision Directive 32, which I think is dated 1982, if I remember correctly, which kind of summarizes the state of the Reagan administration’s dominant policy thinking about relations with the Soviet Union, the Cold War generally.
So set the scene for us there, what it looked like when George came in.
TAUBMAN: You have to remember, the key thing is that at the beginning of the Cold War, the United States adopted the doctrine of containment. This doctrine was the creation of George Kennan, who was the U.S. ambassador in Moscow after the war ended. His theory, which was consistently adhered to through most of the Cold War, was that we have to contain the Soviet Union militarily, economically, politically, because it’s an expansionist power.
That had been the doctrine guiding presidents beginning with Harry Truman. Reagan comes into office, and he essentially wants to not only double down on containment, he wants to do something different. He doesn’t want to just contain the Soviet Union. He wants to roll back Soviet advances around the world. And that’s the core of this national security memo that you describe.
KENNEDY: The phrase roll back goes back at least as far as [Eisenhower’s Secretary of
State] John Foster Dulles.
TAUBMAN: Yeah. But you know, Reagan was really determined to do it. He came into office with this belligerent rhetoric about the Soviet Union, the evil empire. Communism is going to wind up on the ash heap of history—very aggressive rhetoric about the Soviet Union, a huge military buildup supported by Congress, Democrats and Republicans. Remember, it’s the height of the Cold War.
So the whole strategy is to throw the Soviet Union back on its heels. Alexander Haig, Reagan’s first secretary of state, believes in this. But there’s a very interesting moment early in the Reagan presidency. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, writes a boilerplate letter to Reagan that talks about, you know, we need to find peace and try to reduce tensions. The State Department looks at the letter and said this is just the usual propaganda from the Kremlin. They write a response that’s a boilerplate American response. They give it to Reagan. He looks at it. He says, “I don’t want to send that letter.” He sits down and he writes by hand his own letter to Brezhnev.
And it is an amazing letter. When you go back and look at it, it is the letter of a naive idealist. It’s a letter that talks about how we must have peace between our peoples and there’s no need to have this tension. It was a reflection of an inner Reagan that was not visible publicly, really, at this time.
He hands this letter to the State Department. They go back, they rework their letter a little bit. They send back their letter to the president. They say, we want to send this letter
to Brezhnev. He says, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to send your letter and you’re going to send my letter.” And they did it. The people around Reagan—Haig and others, Cap Weinberger—they all thought, “This is crazy. What is the president doing writing a kind of soporific letter like this to the Soviet leader?”
So Shultz comes to town— KENNEDY: To replacer Haig?
TAUBMAN: Yes. Replaces Haig, who’s fired, because—remember the day Reagan was shot and Vice President Bush was out of town and Haig goes into the White House press room and announces to the world, “I’m in charge here”? Which seemed like usurpation of power. Anyway, Reagan fires Haig, brings Shultz in, who has very little foreign policy experience and makes him secretary of state. But what Shultz had, which I think you’ll see in the book, he was aligned with Reagan in ways that the two men didn’t understand when their relationship began. Shultz had gone to the Soviet Union during the Nixon administration, and Shultz believed in experiential learning. Basically, he believe you could tell more with your eyes and ears than you could often learn from intelligence reports.
So he went to the Soviet Union with his wife. She goes to a hospital; she had been a nurse during World War II. She comes back and she says to her husband, “It’s unbeliev-
able. It is like a medieval hospital there. No sanitary, no hygiene. There are multiple operating tables in the same room.” She fills him in on the meager, bleak state of medicine in the Soviet Union.
He goes to a Black Sea resort. And what do they do when they’re there? They take him to a Tsarist palace that they’ve restored. The guide with Shultz says, “We wanted to show this to you so you’ll understand that the communist leaders of this country invest in things other than defense.” He looks at that and he says, “Wow, isn’t that an interesting insight into this country?”
So what Shultz understood viscerally and Reagan understood kind of intellectually because he’d read about it, was that the Soviet Union was a failing state economically. So as secretary of state, he believed [the Kremlin] had an incentive to try to ease tensions, and he wanted to ease tensions.
KENNEDY: Among his adversaries inside and adjacent to the Reagan administration was the so-called Committee on the Present Danger. At least one of the members of that I knew a bit, Richard Pipes. So tell us a little bit about them and how effective they were in trying to counter the Shultz view.
TAUBMAN: They were very effective. Shultz shows up in Washington and becomes secretary of state. He really doesn’t have a relationship with Reagan apart from discus-
sions they’ve had over economic policy issues. As I said, he doesn’t really understand what Reagan wants to do with the Soviet Union. Everything that he’s seen and heard is harsh confrontation. So he tries to get face time with the president.
If you’ve spent any time in Washington, one of the things you learn very quickly is that the secretary of state is only as effective as his or her relationship with the president. Shultz didn’t really have much of a relationship with Reagan, so he wanted to establish one. He keeps asking to have meetings with the president one-on-one, and every time something is arranged, he goes over to the White House and he walks into the Oval Office or the Cabinet Room, and it turns out there are a dozen people there, most of them opposing his proposals to try to ease tensions and open a diplomatic communication with the Kremlin.
It’s interesting you mentioned Richard Pipes. He was a Harvard professor, an expert on the Soviet Union. He had come down to Washington to work on the national security staff. He thought that George Shultz was in way over his head. When I went back and read Richard Pipes’s book and his accounts of the presidency, he’s incredibly dismissive of George Shultz.
KENNEDY: As was Haig
TAUBMAN: As was Haig, [dismissive of Shultz] as a lightweight.
KENNEDY: Just an economist.
TAUBMAN: Yes. Haig at one point said to Shultz, basically, “I don’t know how you’re going to do this job, you’re just an economist.” And Pipes was very dismissive.
So at one point, Shultz goes over to a meeting with Reagan, and he looks around the room and Pipes is sitting there. As Shultz later described it to his aide—who, by the way, kept this amazing diary of all of this, which plays a large part in the book—Shultz looks around the room and he sees Pipes there. And he turns to Reagan, and he says, “Who’s that?” [Laughter.]
KENNEDY: And then what?
TAUBMAN: And it turns out it was Pipes who was opposed to everything he wanted to do. So Shultz would come back to the State Department and say to his aide, Ray Seitz, “How is it that the secretary of state cannot have a one-on-one meeting with the president of the United States, to talk about U.S.-Soviet
relations?”
KENNEDY: So eventually Reagan and Shultz align. But again, as you present it, that took a lot of work on Shultz’s part and Reagan appears, at least in your account, as sort of the passive or subordinate partner in this enterprise. You make a great deal of a dinner they had during a Washington, D.C., blizzard where Nancy Reagan connected with Shultz.
TAUBMAN: Yeah. So if you look back at history—you’re the historian here—it was so stunning to me to see that the end of the Cold War began in many ways, thanks to Mother Nature and thanks to Nancy Reagan, because it was this huge blizzard in Washington in February of 1983. My wife and I were living there at the time; two to three feet of snow fell. I remember we went out and people were skiing on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. Traffic was dead. Nobody was moving.
The Reagans had planned to go to Camp David. They couldn’t get there. So Nancy Reagan took advantage of the blizzard. She was concerned that her husband was being depicted as a warmonger, that his legacy was going to be raising tensions during the Cold War rather than reducing them. So she saw this opportunity at the blizzard, picked up the phone, called the Shultzes, said, “Come over to dinner.” They did. And that dinner was a turning point.
KENNEDY: What’s the date?
TAUBMAN: It was early February ’83. And for the first time—Shultz has now been secretary of state for 7 or 8 months—he has a one-on-one conversation with the president and with Nancy and with Obie. He realizes that night that he and the president actually share this desire to wind down the Cold War.
From that day forth, even though it took him several more years to essentially gain control of U.S. foreign policy, he knew the president and he agreed. So as all of this flak was thrown up around him to try to prevent the policies he was advocating from being advanced, he knew that eventually—he hoped, at least—Reagan would move aggressively in his favor, which he eventually did.
KENNEDY: Let me ask you kind of a big, maybe unanswerable question at this stage of the game, but let’s try to tackle it anyway. There’s a school of thought that Reagan came into office with this notion that he could spend the Soviets into oblivion and challenge
them technologically with the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars. And this would make it clear to them they could not compete any longer and they would have to throw in the towel.
In your book, I don’t quite get the sense that’s a proper narrative, that without Shultz’s presence in that scenario, the story could have ended very, very differently. It comes into focus, it seems to me, to a certain extent, at least at the famous meeting in Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986, when there was a real chance to end the technological competition in space and take a gigantic step toward reconciliation between the Soviet Union and United States.
Do you buy that narrative, which is quite well-formed in some quarters, or do you think it needs qualifying?
TAUBMAN: I think it needs qualifying and I hope my book qualifies it in the following way. There’s no doubt that Reagan came into office determined to confront the Soviet Union, as I said, to throw the Soviet Union back on its heels. Major defense spending and then the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was this technologically exotic space-based shield that would, in theory, knock down all incoming Soviet ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.
So he did succeed in putting the Kremlin on the defensive. What he didn’t know to do until George Shultz showed up was how to translate that into an effective diplomatic strategy. I think absent George Shultz, no matter what Ronald Reagan’s overarching strategy was when he came to Washington, he would have had a hard time succeeding in winding down the Cold War absent George Shultz as secretary of state.
KENNEDY: Let me share a story. When George came back from public service, he was on the Stanford campus. Among the things he did for several years, he convened an annual conference organized around the statesmen around the world in his era. More than once I attended these occasions and the format was, there would be a very nice dinner and maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred people in the room. And then his invited guests each had 10 minutes to get up and give their view of the world. I can remember on one of these occasions the speakers were, through the evening, Giscard d’Estaing, the former president of France, Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore, Oscar Arias from Costa Rica, Geoffrey Howe from the U.K. and Helmut Schmidt [from Germany]. They each gave in 10 minutes their review of the state of the world. And one was more impressive than the next. I mean, they were really senior, serious
“Shultz understood viscerally and Reagan understood kind of intellectually . . . that the Soviet Union was a failing state economically.”
statesmen who really have sophisticated views of the world.
A day or two or three later, I ran into George on campus, thanked them for including me on this occasion. I said, “You know, I can’t help asking if your former boss, Ronald Reagan, had been on the program that evening and asked to get up and give his 10-minute view of the world, how would he have compared with those very impressive gentlemen who got up and spoke?”
His reply to me was, “David, I’ve been in the room with Ronald Reagan and every one of those people, and he dominates every single one of them.”
I did not take that at face value at the time. But you know more about his view of Reagan than I do. So that’s the question. What did George think of Ronald Reagan?
TAUBMAN: Well, he idolized Ronald Reagan to the day he died. I think I understand that to some extent, because the two men, once they forge this working relationship and once Reagan came to understand the value that Shultz brought to the table as a diplomat, the two of them proceeded to wind down the Cold War with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze.
But what George forgot when he told you that, and you can see it in the Seitz diary day after day after day—it’s in detail, wrenching detail at times—is how often Shultz was disappointed by Reagan, and he was disappointed because he couldn’t get Reagan to intervene, to try to settle this internecine warfare that was going on in the Reagan administration.
He couldn’t get the president to stick to decisions that he had made. So, for example, there are cases where Shultz thought that the president had agreed to do something and then it was undone by other aides because Reagan wasn’t paying attention or because the White House chief of staff or the national security adviser wasn’t following up on the decisions. There are a whole series of these things outlined in my book, and they were outlined in Seitz’s diaries. Some of them happened, and later, after Seitz left office, Reagan operated in a disengaged way, often in his presidency. He set the goals.
KENNEDY: You used the word inattentive
TAUBMAN: Inattentive. Disengaged. He set the goals. He was a fantastic communicator. My God, when I go look now at some of the videotape of him, he had this uncanny ability to radiate optimism. You look back at that man and you could see why he was elected overwhelmingly as president two times. You compare that to leaders today, it’s like stunning. Where is that sense of optimism
and hope and energy that he conveyed?
But in the field of national security affairs, it was a more uneven performance. And so I think George had a tendency to be very loyal and respectful of the people with whom he worked and under whom he served. Look, when you look back on the Nixon presidency, there’s the Watergate scandal, you can’t escape it. And yet when Shultz retired, he wrote this incredibly flattering letter to the president, thanking him for the opportunity to serve. No criticism whatsoever. And with Reagan, you look through George Shultz’s correspondence with Reagan at the Hoover Institution archives at Stanford. It’s all flowery, flattering stuff back and forth. He had a hard time, I believe, sometimes reckoning with the weaknesses of some of the people he worked with.
KENNEDY: I think, if I counted correctly, he threatened at one point or another four times to resign over the course of his career under those two presidents. Were any of those in the Reagan [administration]?
TAUBMAN: Yes, most of them were during Reagan. In fact, one day I asked my research assistant to go back and—because it’s kind of interspersed in all the records, it’s hard to figure out how often he threatened to resign. So she did a careful study of it, and it was seven or eight times during the Reagan presidency when he threatened to resign. He used that as leverage. But, you know, he never acted on it.
KENNEDY: Which of those was the most plausible, or felt most deeply?
TAUBMAN: You know, I think it was the day he went in to [see] Reagan, and he was so thoroughly disgusted at the way he had been outmaneuvered and blindsided on some decisions involving American covert military and intelligence activity in central America. During the Reagan administration, that was a big emphasis. They feared that communism was coming to America’s doorstep on the Mexican border. There was Cuba, of course. Then there were the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who were viewed as left wing and sympathetic with the Kremlin. And there was all the upheaval going on in El Salvador that the Reagan administration thought would lead to some kind of leftist government there.
Behind his back, the Reagan hardliners put through a bunch of decisions that the president actually approved—the secretary of state knew nothing about them—to increase all of this military and intelligence activity. So he stormed into the White House one day with a decision to resign. He told the president who the potential successors were. I think that’s the closest he came. Reagan didn’t want him to resign. By this point, Reagan understood that
his presidency would not be a success without George Shultz. He insisted that he stay.
KENNEDY: So George can pull his punch, but rather Reagan talked him out of it.
TAUBMAN: Well, Reagan said, “I won’t accept your resignation.” Well, of course, he still could have resigned.
KENNEDY: Interesting. A member of the audience asked the following, Phil, and I think this refers to the INF and the Pershing II missile controversy. Did Shultz worry about accidental nuclear war when precise first strike missiles were introduced into Europe in an attempt to bankrupt the Soviets?
TAUBMAN: It’s interesting. He was kind of divided about nuclear weapons as secretary of state. He believed in the importance of maintaining the American nuclear arsenal. He believed it was pivotal, really important to get these Pershing intermediate range missiles placed in West Germany, because the Soviet Union was putting similar missiles in the western territories of the Soviet Union.
It was actually, if you look back again at the end of the Cold War, this was a truly pivotal moment when Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, agreed to have these American Pershing missiles placed in West Germany. And it was a moment that essentially signaled to the Kremlin in decisive terms that, “We are here to confront you. We’re not backing down.” It registered in a way that I think ultimately affected the Soviet thinking about trying to end the Cold War. So at that point, he was happy to see more nuclear weapons put into the field. But under that, both he and Reagan shared a real concern about the potential for a nuclear war.
When they got to Reykjavik, it was a snap summit. It was unlike any other previous Cold War summit, where there’s all kinds of preparation and the document [prepared], the summit is negotiated before the two leaders really ever get together. They went to Reykjavik on short notice. There was no communique prepared ahead of time, didn’t know what was going to happen. And Gorbachev drives up with all kinds of far-reaching proposals, which, again, give Reagan credit for this. He went to the Politburo, Gorbachev, and he said, “I’m going to Reykjavik. I’ve got these big, dramatic arms cut proposals I’m taking with them. And we have to reduce our defense expenditures. We cannot sustain them.” Reagan gets to Reykjavik with some pretty good proposals, too, that had been developed on the American side. And they’re seated at this table in this cozy little room overlooking the North Atlantic Sea. They’re there for two days and they came so, so close to agreeing to
eliminate nuclear weapons.
KENNEDY: Eliminate?
TAUBMAN: Eliminate, abolish them; not just reduce them, abolish them. The whole thing ran aground when Gorbachev said, “Okay, we can make a deal, but you got to do something to cut back on your Strategic Defense Initiative.” The deal he offered Reagan was not a bad deal at the time. He said, “Why don’t you just agree to limit research on all this exotic defense technology to the laboratory?”
Reagan said, “No, I won’t accept that.” At one point, at the most dramatic moment at Reykjavik, and it was a really dramatic summit, he hands a little note across the table to Shultz and says, “Am I doing the right thing?” And Shultz says, “Yes.” So they came very close to this historic agreement. They couldn’t agree. The talks collapsed, actually. If you go back and look at the photographs, there’s this grim photograph—Reagan’s getting into his limo, Gorbachev is standing there. They both look as if they’re at a funeral.
But it turned out that the groundwork that was laid at Reykjavik actually made it possible within the next year to come to agreement, to eliminate those intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe.
KENNEDY: There’s a school of thought—I associate it with your brother, Bill Taubman, who’s written a terrific biography of Gorbachev—that the Reagan-Shultz outreach to Gorbachev went cold or went dormant when George H.W. Bush came in. Bush 41. And the inattention to Gorbachev in the years immediately following Reagan and Shultz’s exit from office was fatal for Gorbachev, and that led to his being ousted as the leader of the Soviet Union [anad it] collapsing.
TAUBMAN: Well, you know, it’s a complicated issue. It is the roots of what Vladimir Putin would tell you was his justification to invade Ukraine. I don’t buy that. But that’s his justification, that as the Cold War was ending the United States, rather than trying to help Russia recover from communism and rebuild its economy, decided to expand NATO to its borders, which Putin certainly perceived as threatening.
But to go back to the beginning of your question, this was a kind of poignant and important moment. George H.W. Bush has been elected president. Gorbachev surprises Reagan and the president-elect by saying he’s coming to New York to speak to the U.N. in December of ’88. Suddenly there’s an opportunity for yet another summit meeting between Gorbachev and Reagan with the next president of the United States present.
So they meet on Governors Island in New
York Harbor. Reagan and Shultz thought this was going to be a moment when they sort of hand it off to George H.W. Bush, who would then continue this momentum to dealing with the Soviet Union in a constructive way. But Bush’s advisers, particularly Brent Scowcroft, his incoming national security adviser, advised him to slow down, put on the brakes, “We think that Reagan and Shultz have gone too far, too fast.” So there’s this kind of poignant moment out on Governors Island where Gorbachev comes over to Shultz and says, “How come George Bush is so standoffish? Why isn’t he participating in our conversations here?” The reason he wasn’t participating was he didn’t think he wanted to pick up where Reagan and Shultz were leaving off.
Shultz was very bitter about that for the following decades. He would come back to that to me frequently, that he didn’t understand why they wouldn’t just move forward with what he had done. I suppose it’s all speculation. Had they picked up where he left off in the spirit that he and Reagan left off and had come to provide massive foreign aid to Russia, maybe history would have turned out differently. But you know what? Let’s be realistic. You think if an American president had gone to Congress in 1989 and then later as the Soviet Union was collapsing and said, “We want to give billions of dollars to Russia,” they never would have been approved by Congress.
KENNEDY: We have another question from our audience here, and I suppose it’s an inevitable question. Did you discuss the Theranos scandal with him?
TAUBMAN: Yes, of course. It was the unavoidable topic late in George’s life, sadly so. He and I had a kind of come-to-Jesus sort of moment over this, where I had to ask him about his relationship with Elizabeth Holmes and his involvement in Theranos. It was a very tough interview. When he invited me to do his biography and gave me access to his papers, including the Seitz diary, I made very clear what my intent was. I said, “George, it’s your life, but it’s my book. I will have complete control over the contents, and you will have zero control over the contents.” He agreed to that.
So we’re seated in his conference room at Stanford University. I’m saying, “How did you get involved in Theranos? Once it became clear that Theranos was a fraudulent enterprise, that the technology was not working, and your grandson told you this, who was working at the company at your suggestion, how could you not disown Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos?”
He sat there. We went over this for almost
an hour. He would still not disown Elizabeth Holmes. To this day, I don’t understand it. The best I can do to try to explain it is I’ll be blunt about it. I think that he was intoxicated, infatuated with Elizabeth Holmes. I mean, she was in her twenties. He was in his nineties. This was not a romantic relationship, obviously, but it didn’t mean that he wasn’t infatuated with her. I think at the peak value of Theranos stock, the stock that she had given him and a few shares that he had bought was worth more than $50 million. That may have influenced his thinking.
The last reason I think he stuck by her was this sense of loyalty he had throughout his life. It began on the battlefields of World War II in the Pacific, when it’s a life-saving thing, if you don’t have the back of your colleagues, you and they may die. He carried that through his life. He remained loyal to Nixon throughout Watergate. He remained loyal to Reagan, even though Shultz knew that the Strategic Defense Initiative was technologically a fancy, couldn’t possibly be achieved. And sadly, he stood by Elizabeth Holmes when her fraud was exposed.
KENNEDY: He also, to my knowledge, at least correct me if I’m wrong, never took public voice about the candidacy of Donald Trump for the presidency.
TAUBMAN: Well, he did, but it was in a kind of anemic way. I talked to him about Trump as the fall of 2016 played out and Trump was running for president. After a while, it became clear that Shultz thought that Trump was taking over his beloved Republican Party. George Shultz remained a Republican through his life. Trump was turning it into a darker direction, but he wouldn’t speak up about it. One day I said to him, “I’m your biographer. People will read about you. I hope, for decades to come in my book. Don’t you have something you want to say about Donald Trump as he’s running for president and his anti-immigrant policies,” all the things that he stood for at the time that were abhorrent? Not to me necessarily as an American citizen, but to the Republican Party that George Shultz had been a loyal member of for his whole life. I think that sort of made an [impact] on him. So the Friday of Labor Day weekend in 2016, he and Henry Kissinger issued a statement saying they planned not to vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, but would be happy to serve for either candidate, whoever was elected. And he remained largely quiet on the sidelines during the Trump presidency, even though privately he became increasingly alarmed about the Trump presidency.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26
Depart the U.S. on independent flights to Zurich.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27
ARRIVE ZURICH, SWITZERLAND
Arrive in Zurich, Switzerland, and transfer to our hotel. This evening gather for a tour orientation and welcome dinner at a local restaurant.
Hotel Europe Zurich (D)
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28
TITISEE-NEUSTADT, GERMANY
After breakfast depart for Titisee-Neustadt (New City) in the Black Forest. En route we visit the breathtaking Rhine Falls and have lunch on our own. We arrive in the late afternoon for check-in, followed by dinner at the hotel.
Walking: ~ 1.5 miles / ~2 hours, paved paths and city streets
Maritim Titisee Hotel (B,D)
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29
FREIBURG / TITISEE-NEUSTADT
Take a train to Freiburg, the capital city of the Black Forest and the most southern city in Germany. It is frequently called Germany’s ‘sustainable city’ and, taking advantage of the sunny location near the Rhine River in Baden-Württemberg, it is renowned for its ecological initiatives, vineyards, and university life. Enjoy a walking tour of the old town with a local guide followed by free time to explore on your own. Visit one of Freiburg’s numerous cafes and pastry shops and try Black Forest Cake or Freiburg Bobbele (chocolate). Return by train to Titisee-Neustadt.
Walking: ~ 2 miles / ~2 hours, city streets
Maritim Titisee Hotel (B)
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30
BLACK FOREST HIGHLANDS
Today we hike the Heritage Trail of the Black
Forest Highlands, which also functions as an open-air museum. We begin by walking through the Löffeltal and the beautiful forest, along Rotbach Stream to the Hell Valley. Enjoy a short visit to St. Oswald Chapel which dates back to 1148. See Hofgut Sternen, where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once stayed, and attend a demonstration of the local glass blowing. After lunch, continue hiking and pass through the Ravenna Viaduct with its impressive stone arches, and take in the romantic Ravenna Valley. We follow the trail until it takes us back to the hotel.
Walking: ~ 5 miles / ~3 hours, trail walking Maritim Titisee Hotel (B,L)
MONDAY, OCTOBER 1
FELDBERG / TITISEE-NEUSTADT
We drive to Feldberg (4’711 ft), the highest summit of the Black Forest. Walk to Feldsee, a cirque lake, created by the glaciers of the last Ice Age. It is over 100 feet deep and is the largest cirque lake in the Black Forest. Steep walls surround the lake on three sides, and rare protected alpine plants can be found on the sunny rocks. After lunch at a farmhouse, we hike to Feldberg Valley Station. Weather permitting, we enjoy a boat ride on this magical lake.
Walking: ~ 5 miles / ~3 hours, mountain trails Maritim Titisee Hotel (B,L)
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 2
ALSACE / COLMAR, FRANCE
This morning we head to Colmar, France. We travel via Kaiserstuhl, a geologically volcanic region, and Germany’s sunniest area, with a mountain range, grapevines, and a uniquely diverse flora. Enjoy a walk in the Rhine River Valley area with a local expert. Discover colorful meadows, almond trees, wild orchids, cacti, and an abundance of vineyard herbs. We then continue to Neuf-Brisach for lunch at a local restaurant. See the Neuf-Breisach Fortress, one of the last fortresses built by the brilliant engineer Sébastien Le Prestre, Lord of Vauban. At the service of Louis XIV, he created the “iron belt”, a series of fortifications capable of resisting any siege and protecting the borders
of France. After our visit, we continue to our hotel in Colmar for dinner.
Walking: ~ 3 miles / ~2.5, cobblestone streets
Le Grand Hôtel Bristol Colmar (B,L,D)
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3
VALLÉE DE MUNSTER, LES VOSGES / COLMAR
We set off this morning for Petit Ballon (4’173 ft), a flat summit situated in the Vosges Mountains, a small mountain range separating the Munster Valley and the Lauch Valley. This is an area of woodland, pasture, wetland, farmland, and historical sites. We hike through forests and over colorful meadows, and we see the political border between Germany and France. On the top of the summit, an amazing panorama surrounds us. We enjoy lunch at a local inn, before returning to our hotel.
Walking: ~ 4-5 miles / ~3 hours, easy trails
Le Grand Hôtel Bristol Colmar (B,L,D)
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4
COLMAR / ALSACE WINE REGION
Discover the town of Colmar during a guided tour walking down the flower-bedecked alleys, and past traditional buildings and canals. Colmar’s thousand-year-old history is visible at every corner. After the tour, enjoy some time exploring this city on your own. In the afternoon we walk through the vineyards and learn about the capital of the Alsace wine region. Enjoy a stop for a wine tasting before returning to our hotel. Dinner on your own.
Walking: ~ 2 miles / ~2 hours, paved roads
Le Grand Hôtel Bristol Colmar (B,L)
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5
ALSACE / WWI & WWII HISTORY
Visit the Linge Memorial Museum and the site of a battlefield in WWI. As the only mountain battlefield on the western front, it holds a special significance and is a powerful place of remembrance. We then start a hike, one that takes us through history as we see war trenches and the forests of former battlefields. We make stops at local inns (ferme auberge) and enjoy lunch. This afternoon we visit the American 21st Corps Monument in Sigolsheim. This
monument honors American soldiers who sacrificed themselves during World War II helping liberate the Alsace. Return to the hotel for dinner on your own.
Walking: ~ 5 miles / ~3 hours, natural and gravel paths
Le Grand Hôtel Bristol Colmar (B,L)
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6
STRASBOURG
Today we explore Strasbourg, the capital of the Alsace and an international hub. Enjoy a narrated boat ride on the river, and then take a guided walking tour through the vibrant streets. Learn about the European Parliament in Strasbourg and how it made Strasbourg a proud symbol of democratic values, peace, and reconciliation. Learn how modern architects connected their art to the old structures. Then enjoy free time in the city strolling the shopping mile, visiting one of the city’s excellent museums, or relaxing in a café at the river. In the late afternoon, return to Colmar for our farewell dinner at a local restaurant.
Walking: ~ 2 miles / ~2 hours, city streets
Le Grand Hôtel Bristol Colmar (B,D)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7
ALSACE / ZURICH
On our last day, we start with a small hike through the Alsace Plain, which encompasses an extensive number and variety of castles. Arrive to Eguisheim for lunch on your own and time to explore this town which was officially named “one of the most beautiful villages in France”. Settled in the Roman Age, it is also the hometown of Pope Leo XI (10021054). Today, its long history is also visible in the town’s onion-shaped appearance, with houses circularly surrounding the town center. We then transfer to Zurich for a free evening in this vibrant Swiss city. Dinner is on your own.
Walking: ~ 3 miles / ~2 hours, natural and gravel paths
Dorint Airport Hotel Zurich (B)
MONDAY, OCTOBER 8
ZURICH / U.S.
Depart via the hotel shuttle for independent flights home. (B)
$6,595 per person, double occupancy
Single Supplement: $1,050
Minimum 8, Maximum 16
INCLUDED:
Tour leader, local guides, and speakers; activities as specified in the itinerary; transportation throughout; airport transfers on designated group dates and times; 11 nights accommodations as specified (or similar); 11 breakfasts, 5 lunches (including some picnic lunches), 5 dinners; wine and beer with welcome and farewell events; Commonwealth Club representative with 10 or more participants; gratuities to local guides, drivers, and for all included group activities; pre-departure materials.
International airfare; gratuity to tour leader; visa and passport fees; meals not specified as included; optional outings and gratuities for those outings; alcoholic beverages beyond welcome and farewell events; travel insurance (recommended, information will be sent upon registration); items of a purely personal nature.
Participants must be in good health and able to keep up with an active group of walkers. Walks are moderate with some more strenuous segments. On average we walk 2-5 miles each day over 2-4 hours, broken up throughout the day. Travelers should be able to walk on gravel and dirt hiking trails, over uneven terrain, and use stairs without handrails. Sturdy walking/ hiking shoes are required; ankle-high shoes are recommended. One does not have to participate in every activity, but we want you to be aware of the pace.
SEPTEMBER 26 – OCTOBER 8, 2023
Phone: (415) 597-6720
Fax: (415) 597-6729
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We strongly advise that all travelers purchase trip cancellation and interruption insurance as coverage against a covered unforeseen emergency that may force you to cancel or leave trip while it is in progress. A brochure describing coverage will be sent to you upon receipt of your reservation.
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ITINERARY CHANGES & TRIP DELAY: Itinerary is based on information available at the time of printing and is subject to change. We reserve the right to change a program’s dates, staff, itineraries, or accommodations as conditions warrant. If a trip must be delayed, or the itinerary changed, due to bad weather, road conditions, transportation delays, airline schedules, government intervention, sickness or other contingency for which CWC or European Walking Tours or its agents cannot make provision, the cost of delays or changes is not included.
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INFLATION, RISING INTEREST RATES, SWEEPING tech layoffs, a crypto meltdown. At the same time, unemployment remains at historic lows and the GDP hits new highs. What’s happening to the economy in 2023? Excerpted from the February 2, 2023, program “Navigating a Turbulent Economy: Annual Economic Forecast 2023” The Walter E. Hoadley Annual Economic Forecast is presented by Bank of America.
MICHAEL BOSKIN, Professor of Economics and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Chair, President’s Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush
MAURICE OBSTFELD, Professor of Economics, University of California Berkeley; Former Chief Economist, International Monetary Fund
ANN E. HARRISON, Economist and Dean of the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.
ANN E. HARRISON: The organizers of the World Economic Forum in Davos, held a few weeks ago, used the term polycrisis to describe a looming convergence of global risks, including world inflation, the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis.
But according to the Financial Times, the consensus among experts at Davos seemed to be that things are looking up for the global economy. Would you agree that things are looking up for either the U.S. or the rest of the world?
MICHAEL BOSKIN: Sure. If by looking up we mean the last few months relative to what was being forecast before that, yes,
things on balance are looking up. Six months ago, people were forecasting a very high likelihood of a recession in the U.S., perhaps a deep one in Europe. And there was some uncertainty about China opening [up].
But since then, much of the data is looking up. The Fed’s close to the end of its interest rate hikes. They usually take 12 to 18 months to affect the real economy of output and employment. There are some other positive signs, with China opening up and
Europe seeming to weather the forecast of a really difficult winter with imports from the U.S. and Qatar, but then also a warm winter has helped to. So the energy crisis in Europe seems to have been muted.
All that said, there are some other disturbing signs. The last few months consumers have been pulling back. Housing is in bad shape, because of the tripling of
mortgage interest rates. So there are some signs, there are some pros and cons, but on balance, things are looking up.
I think a big chunk of the forecast now in terms of probability is to either skirt recession with a slowdown or to have a mild recession. I think most people have reduced the probability of something severe and long lasting, but we shouldn’t rule it
out. We’ve had occasion where we looked like we were starting to get out of the woods and that didn’t hold and we wound up in a deeper recession later. So on balance, yes.
HARRISON: Dr. Obstfeld, you’ve been quoted as saying that there was a greater than 50/50 chance that there’d be a recession in 2023. You said this back in December. How do you feel now?
MAURICE OBSTFELD: I would like to make it more interesting by disagreeing more with Mike. But I really can’t. I still think that the odds of a recession emerging at some point next year are pretty good. But, you know, I think the sort of recession/ nonrecession dichotomy is a little bit misleading to focus on that. We’re clearly going to have a slowdown next year relative to the
past year in the U.S., an even bigger slowdown in Europe.
China will grow more quickly for sure, compared to what they did under zero COVID, and that is going to boost Asia. But there are parts of the world, like Latin America, which are facing widespread political crises and probably lower growth. So I think all in all, it’s going to be a tough year. Alone among major advanced economies, the U.K. is forecast to have negative growth by the IMF. But we’ll see what happens. Are we seeing a false dawn, as has happened in the past, or will we have a soft landing? If we do have a soft landing, that’s going to be a very rare event by the standards of past history.
HARRISON: The Fed officials met yesterday. Were you surprised by their decision? What would you have done?
BOSKIN: I think it was the right move. Looking back, they were quite late in starting to raise their target interest rate, the short run Fed funds rate. I wrote in the spring of 2021, not quite two years ago, that the additional fiscal stimulus and continued monetary stimulus will likely lead to inflation and then slow growth as they had to react.
So I think they were probably nine months too late to get started. You know, there was so much uncertainty at the beginning of COVID, how bad would this be? How deep would it be? How long would it last? Was the early, apparent, rapid recovery from a very deep hole going to continue? All all that uncertainty, I think, led to a bit of over-insurance by the monetary and fiscal authorities. But I think by mid 2021, it was pretty clear that they were behind the curve, and they took a while to adjust. I said at the time that I thought they’d get up to around four and a half percent and reconnoiter. I think that’s more or less what they did. They got up to it fairly rapidly from a late start.
Usually you have to get the short run Fed funds interest rate above the rate of inflation for a while to actually have a good chance of bringing inflation down. We’ve seen it come down some. It’s inching down on a trailing 12-month basis the last few months. It’s been better than that. But there’s so much uncertainty about the seasonal adjustments, and there’s so many swings to the headline
number from booming energy prices to collapsing energy prices. So the Fed looks at what’s called the core rate, the personal consumption expenditures deflater—I’m sorry to use techno language; but it’s not exactly the CPI that’s more commonly known— and they try to look at what’s happening as you strip out food and energy prices to underlying inflation. Goods prices have been coming down, especially in energy. But the big problem is that inflation has spread to services. And that’s going to take a little while longer to get down.
OBSTFELD: To put everything in perspective, the last few years have been almost unprecedented in terms of the scale of the economic adjustments and shocks that we’ve seen in the global economy. You really have to go back to the mobilizations and the reconstruction after World War I and World War II to see to have something comparable. And of course, we didn’t have the level of destruction, certainly of physical capital, that we saw. We had some human capital certainly destroyed. And then on top of that, you had the Ukraine war and the sanctions and all the dislocations those have caused. So it’s a very hard environment for policymakers and for making forecasts about what’s going to happen.
Now, having said that, I agree with Professor Boskin that the Fed was really late to the game. Clearly by the fall of 2021, it was obvious that inflation was running at a dangerous level. It’s hard to understand why they didn’t move more quickly. That put them into a position where they were really playing catch up and scrambling and probably engineering a much steeper pace of interest rate hikes than they would have done otherwise.
That’s one of the reasons why I still think, as we see this play out after the year to 18 months that we think they will take, we may see more effects than even we have seen so far. We have seen some effects so far. Manufacturing has been in contraction for three months now. There are a number of very negative leading indicators. I was kind of surprised by the sort of soft tone of Chair Powell’s remarks given what had gone before, with the Fed basically trying to telegraph resolve and sort of make up for its tardiness in addressing the inflation prob-
lem. Basically they didn’t slam the door on the idea, which markets have embraced, that the Fed will cut this year.
I don’t think that’s really likely, personally. The effect of that you can see in the stock market, you can see it in the bond market, you can see in mortgage rates falling today. And that works exactly counter to the desire to bring inflation down. So I’m not sure that the Fed did themselves any favors with the sort of mixed messaging that came out of yesterday’s events.
BOSKIN: In [the] last couple of decades, economists have started to look at the use of alternative tools in addition just to the setting of the short term interest rate. And I think Maury rightly pointed to the tone and sometimes what’s called forward guidance; they will be a little more direct about what they’re likely to do in an effort to affect longer term interest rates, not just shorter term interest rates.
People have now gotten to the point where they’re textually analyzing the comments of the Federal Reserve chairs and matching it with optimistic words and pessimistic words. I think that’s fine. I agree with Maury that the message was a little softer than might have been, but in any event, I think in some sense this is of a second-order consideration at this point. I think unless something unusual happens, there are only going to be one or two more modest interest rate hikes, and unless inflation proves a lot more stubborn than the base case looks like right now.
HARRISON: Well, let me follow up on that question. What’s your best guess for when inflation will come down to the Federal Reserve’s goal of 2 percent annually?
BOSKIN: With a wide distribution, 2024— late 2024, maybe.
HARRISON: How about you, Maury?
OBSTFELD: Yeah, I would say if things go well, in a positive scenario, that’s what we would expect. And that’s also sort of [what] Jay Powell called a soft-ish landing scenario. It wouldn’t be until then.
HARRISON: So let me follow up on that soft landing idea. Do you think it’s possible that inflation can come down without leading to a recession and job losses?
BOSKIN: A couple of things about that. First of all, yes, of course, it’s possible. As
Maury said earlier, such instances are rare. But the mid-’90s was one example. So we shouldn’t rule it out. History suggests it’s a hard thing to manage, particularly with something as blunt as interest rates, with a lot else going on, a lot of the puts and calls, shocks to the economy and so on.
However, I think it’s worth remembering that, as Maury put it earlier, this sort of false dawn, etc., that there’s some possibility this will drag on. Unless there’s a very big shock to the economy from external forces, for example, or we wind up having a much deeper problem in the financial sector than anyone anticipates right now from the data, I think it is possible. I think the odds of a soft landing are decent, if you have a broad interpretation of what soft means. Such as the slower growth and inflation comes down very gradually and we’re all happy.
I would say there’s one other thing, and it’s the biggest question mark in my mind about what’s going to happen. First of all, the way a recession is announced historically by the National Bureau of Economic Research Business Cycle Dating Committee—Maury and I are both research associates of NBER, but not on that committee— they’re supposed to look at four things. Increasingly, they’ve weighted employment—payroll employment—the most. The potentially most important uncertainty to me is how the broader economy—not just in the tech sector, [which has had] a lot of layoffs—but the broader economy reacts at a time when it’s been very hard to hire workers for a long time.
So they hoard workers, not lay off as many as they normally would, etc. That’s hard to know. We just got the most recent data showing there’s now 1.9 job openings for every unemployed person. This is kind of a historically unprecedented time to be talking about this. And for the last two or three years, even going back just right before COVID, especially, smaller businesses were having a very hard time attracting workers.
That’s something I’m trying to pay close attention to. And it’s interwoven with lots of things, policies that are fairly generous during COVID and have continued, some of which should be gradually phased out. That made it easier for people to stay home
and not work. There’s still a spread between employees’ desire to work more remotely than employers would like them to. That’s been narrowing.
So those are a variety of things that I look at. I would say right now that my guess is layoffs relative to the state of the [economy], measured by GDP and so on, [will] probably be somewhat less than we would have expected from historical experience because of this phenomenon.
HARRISON: Let me move to a favorite topic—the stock market. I’m sure we’re all delighted that January has been much better than last year. But when will the stock market fully recover?
BOSKIN: First of all, we should figure out where it was, which was selling at 23 times earnings. Kind of quite unprecedented, basically heavily supported by virtually zero interest rates for a long time. And a huge part of the run-up in the stock market, say the S&P 500, was the vastly disproportionate run-up in large tech company shares, anticipating low interest rates and continued rapid growth.
That was kind of a false presumption from the very torrid rate in 2020 and 2021 during COVID, when they were hiring like mad. Amazon, I think, announced 12,000 layoffs, but they hired 30,000 people in this period. But if you take a look at that, that wasn’t going to continue. Air was go-
ing to come out of that anyway. Generally with higher interest rates, but especially for stocks of companies that were rapidly growing, that was going to take the biggest hit in that.
Now it’s down to the high teens. It’s still a bit above normal, but real interest rates may be a bit lower than historical for a long time. So I think it’s more fairly valued now than it was at this peak. So if you mean fully recovered, I don’t know how much further it has to go to be fully recovered. I wouldn’t take the benchmark of where it was before the initial hit with COVID and then the big run-up that also occurred, by the way, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the Great Recession—the stock market recovered much more rapidly than employment and output. So I don’t know if that’s going to be the new trend, but low interest rates certainly help stocks, particularly those of companies [that] are growing rapidly.
HARRISON: Dr. Boskin, let me ask you another question about the market. Based on the current economic forecast and your personal views, what is the most attractive investment to make in 2023? [Laughter.]
BOSKIN: Well, when my undergraduates ask me about that, I say the first thing is, you can make 20 percent by not running up credit card debt. So that’s the easy one. And it’s hard to make 20 percent in anything else. However, looking at it, I think bonds have become a little more attractive, particularly for people who are a little risk averse. And maybe that’s generally an older population.
But I still think if you have a long horizon that I’d be primarily in broad-based, low-cost-to-execute stocks, maybe S&P 500 fund or a broader fund or something like that, which should be a big base part of your portfolio and you should try to ride out market ups and downs. Trying to bet on the timing of the market is, especially for people who aren’t getting paid a lot of money to make those I would call them guesses, I think is probably not a wise idea.
HARRISON: Dr. Obstfeld, are you in agreement?
OBSTFELD: I don’t disagree with any of that. I think the market is basically recovered at this point. If interest rates return to very low levels, we could enter into anoth-
“We just got the most recent data showing there’s now 1.9 job openings for every unemployed person. This is kind of a historically unprecedented time to be talking about this.”
—MICHAEL BOSKIN
er period of speculation, such as we saw a while ago before the Fed started its hiking cycle. But right now what you can earn in treasuries looks pretty good if you want to park money. And if you’re at the age of my children and you’re facing a long investment horizon, then probably stocks will be a good bet.
HARRISON: So let me turn to the labor market, which you talked briefly about. Even though where we live we see a lot of headlines about layoffs, in fact, it’s true that, as you pointed out, the U.S. labor market is extremely strong and has been for a while. Is there any sign of the labor market easing? And do you have an outlook for the rest of 2023?
BOSKIN: Yeah. Just to be honest, I think it’s a huge open question that we don’t have a lot of data on. I think it’s a pretty unprecedented situation to be facing a slowdown or recession, and have so many job openings and firms facing this conundrum: Do I keep people I would normally have laid off in an analogous situation because it’s been so hard to hire and retain people?
So I think that the labor market remains stronger than might have been projected based on previous experience for the slowdown. But I do think that we will see this spread some. I think Maury’s right that a really soft landing that you don’t even notice you’ve landed, in an airplane analogy, I think is probably unlikely. But I think that I’m not looking for unemployment to get up to levels it was at not only in deep recessions—10 percent in the aftermath of the beginning of the Great Recession from the financial crisis or to the even higher levels in the COVID layoffs. But I don’t even think it’s going to get up to the 7.7 percent or so it’s gotten in previous, allegedly mild recessions, which were shorter duration and by themselves. But I’d be surprised if the layoffs didn’t spread some.
I think it’s important to remember, especially if you’re here in the Bay Area, that the employment at the tech companies that are in the headlines are a very tiny fraction of the total labor force. And of course, technology is a larger fraction of the labor force more broadly, because most firms have I.T. departments, for example. So not all tech workers work for Amazon and Apple and
Google and Oracle. So I think it’s important to look at what’s happening elsewhere. But we’re going to see layoffs elsewhere. I think they’ll just be not as dramatic.
There’s also a new element in this, which is California has the Warn Act. So you have to announce layoffs. Now, if you’re shutting down a line of business, but you’re still hiring somewhere else, you don’t report the net number, you report the gross number. So we’ll have to pay some attention to that as well. I don’t think it’s going to be pleasant, but it’s not going to be nearly as bad as we’ve had recently, unless there’s a bunch of bigger shocks than is currently expected.
HARRISON: Speaking of shocks, the ratio of the U.S. national debt is the largest as a ratio to GDP that it’s been since the end of World War II. Is this something that we should be worried about?
BOSKIN: Well, I tend to be somewhat hawkish on deficits and debt. I believe that when you’re running deficits—and debt is the accumulation of all previous deficits, net of any surpluses, which we haven’t run very often—and so it’s now a little under 100 percent of GDP, if you exclude the Fed’s holdings and the Social Security Administration and so on, which is more or less where we were in the immediate aftermath of World War II. What got us out of that conundrum was we had very rapid growth after World War II, so we mostly grew our way out of it.
The public sector was much smaller then. It’s grown immensely relative to GDP, and it’s changed from mostly doing goods and services—the military, roads, stuff like that—to now being a transfer of income and a social insurer with Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and so on. So we have a more robust, if imperfect, safety net.
So we look at all that. It seems to me we have to really think about what we’re borrowing the money for, that’s left out of the conversation. There are some things that
Top to bottom: Michael Boskin; Maurice Obstfeld; Bank of America
Senior Vice President David Leimsieder (standing, right) introduces the panel.
make sense to borrow for. President Roosevelt financed three quarters of World War II with debt. That was the right thing to do, because we would have to have had an immense tax increase, which would have been much worse for the economy. So if you have a big public investment build up, that’s temporary for a few years—the interstate highway system, the Reagan military buildup, which most foreign policy experts say helped end the Cold War without firing a shot—it might make sense to borrow for that, because in addition to the swings in taxes you’d have to have, which are disruptive, they’re also doing things that are providing security for future generations. So they’re not as intergenerationally inequitable as if we were taking that money and spending it on current consumption. So we should evaluate, in my view, and target the spending better and be careful that we’re not just borrowing.
Alexander Hamilton, our first treasury secretary, argued for the federal government to assume the Revolutionary War debts of the states—which put the states in a very difficult position—that it was the price of liberty. Now we borrow money to fund growing entitlement payments. That will eventually stop. Social Security and Medicare trust funds are going to not be able to make full payments on projected benefits later this decade. So we’re going to have to figure out how we’re going to deal with this problem, and I think it is going to be politically disruptive. We should try to make it not so economically disruptive that we can make some sensible decisions and have things phasing gradually and have grace periods, etc.
HARRISON: Dr. Obstfeld, would you like to comment on that?
OBSTFELD: You know, again, I agree. I don’t think the level of federal debt itself is the big problem right now. I mean, it’s not great, obviously, but it’s really the entitlements and the demographics that are really making Social Security and Medicare unsustainable. Basically we have to tax our children, many of whom are having a tougher time in the labor market. There’s been slower population growth. And we have to fund these things, and young generations which are actually still pissed off
about what happened during COVID, rightly feel that there’s some element of unfairness here.
At the same time, you look in Washington and both major parties now agree that entitlements should not be touched; not everyone in those parties, but a large swath of the Republican Party. So there’s a fight about the debt limit, which is focused on discretionary spending, which is a third of the budget. And that’s just not going to really be impactful. So one solution or one piece of a solution would be in terms of coming to a consensus on immigration in a way that would allow more immigration, particularly high-skilled immigration. That doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. So we really are in a pickle, and I’m not sure how the dysfunction ends.
BOSKIN: I would just add something at the risk of intruding on Maury’s international expertise. Our demographics are challenging, as you just said. The ratio of people over 65 or pick any other age—I used to think of that as old age, I don’t anymore. [Laughter.] In any event, in the U.S., the ratio of retirees to workers is quite a bit smaller than in many other parts of the world. In Japan the labor force is shrinking. We have places where the population is shrinking—Russia, the population is apparently shrinking. If you believe the data of parts of Western Europe, many parts of Italy, perhaps in the worse shape in that regard. So the demography is really, really difficult. About half of the growth of Social Security benefits that are projected are due to demography, and about half are due to rising real benefits over time per beneficiary.
There are many solutions that have been out there. Some have been tried and worked okay in the past, but there will have to be eventually some coming to terms with this. We economists have been arguing about this for decades. The last time we made any major revisions to the entitlement programs was in 1983. So we’re now four decades later. And what seemed to be obvious from the projections is now very much in front of us in the next few years.
HARRISON: We’ve been running deficits pretty much ever since.
So I’m going to shift to the international
and global economy. Dr. Obstfeld, a question about the global economic fallout from the war in Ukraine, [which] has led to higher food prices, energy prices, disruptions in global trade. How do you see the impacts of that playing out in 2023?
OBSTFELD: Even before the Ukraine war broke out, global energy prices were high and global food prices were historically high. These two go together in a way, because high oil prices draws corn into ethanol, natural gas is a big component of fertilizer. So they really go together. And we were in bad shape before the war in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine drove everything into overdrive.
If you look at where we are now, prices have kind of dropped back to where they were before, both because markets have adjusted and because countries have worked very hard to find alternative sources of supply. So one of the reasons for the development that Mike mentioned before, the surprising resilience of Europe to the energy situation, is that they’ve done a great job in amping up their supplies of natural gas from sources other than Russia. They’re also benefiting from the unseasonably warm winter.
So in some sense we’re back where we were price-wise. We’re not back where we were geopolitically, in the sense that the sanctions are still there and this whole process of sanctioning and an increase in geopolitical tensions has really accelerated the sort of deglobalization trend, which we had already started to see even before COVID, which COVID itself helped accelerate somewhat.
And the way that proceeds is, I think, one of the big fallouts of the war, but also of prior developments, and is certainly something that’s going to be negative for growth, negative for consumers, possibly negative for world peace going forward.
HARRISON: On that topic, do you see the globalization—the world was globalizing more and more since the end of World War II and now we’ve seen a reversal—do you see do you see any changes in that reversal? Do you see any hope for global cooperation?
OBSTFELD: I think global cooperation is more necessary than ever, and it’s a shame
that it has broken down to the extent that it has. Basically, I sort of view the world now as retreating much more to the kind of alignment we had in the Cold War. We’ve got the West, which includes, broadly defined, [South] Korea, Japan, Singapore, countries like that; the former communist bloc, you know, Russia and China are sort of uncomfortably glommed together there, because I think the Chinese have serious misgivings about what Vladimir Putin is doing. And then there’s this big nonaligned world, and nobody quite has the confidence they used to have that trade or financial relations will continue in the way that they have.
When the West freezes a country’s international reserves, that’s a big deal. The U.S. froze Japan’s international reserves in 1940 and embargoed shipments of U.S. oil to Japan. The U.S. was the biggest supplier. And that pretty directly led to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
So we are kind of on dangerous ground here, and I think we need to try to move back from this precipice that we’re approaching. I think there are a couple of global projects that really need attention and where the U.S. has an opportunity to be more of a leader than it has. One is in the climate area, where there would be broad buy-in from the nonaligned world, and also in the area of international public health, where there was a heightened awareness of the deficiencies in that area as a result of COVID. Now that COVID is over for us, we are not focused on that as much. But if you look at public health needs and the threat of the emergence of other pandemics, which is very real, the world as a whole could benefit from really upping the game in terms of global public health infrastructure.
The U.S. has better position than any country to be a leader here. It would not be that expensive, certainly compared to raising military budgets. And I would personally like to see this be a major locus where the U.S. launches initiatives with the nonaligned world.
BOSKIN: Let me bring in a couple of [thoughts], as I think Maury does raise some important questions. And on many of them we’re in close agreement. I would just raise one implication and one observation. The implication—I would put it slight-
ly differently, but I think we’re in the same place—that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine made it much more obvious how dangerous the world is and has become. The day before, I don’t think we were in great shape. I think that there were growing tensions and there was always the risk of things spilling out and over.
That in combination with the fact that our military has been slowly losing its competitive advantage relative to the military of other countries, because we haven’t recapitalized, we have many weapons systems that are long in the tooth. We have lots of other issues. The force has been shrinking. The Navy is too small and not equipped really to deal with anything, the Chinese military invasion of Taiwan, for example, should we choose to defend them, which is a whole other set of questions. So I think that has raised the understanding more broadly in our leadership, especially in Congress, that the military is going to need to be rebuilt in several ways, and that’s not going to be cheap.
Hopefully we can get a big chunk of that from better efficiencies in the Pentagon, which are certainly there. There seems to be something like maybe an eighth of the budget that has actually nothing to do with defense, that’s been put into the defense budget. That really belongs elsewhere. That’s number one.
“The U.S. froze Japan’s international reserves in 1940 and embargoed shipments of U.S. oil to Japan. The U.S. was the biggest supplier. And that pretty directly led to the attack on Pearl Harbor.”
—MAURICE OBSTFELD
Maury properly mentioned that all the attention is on one third of the budget called discretionary spending, the part that’s annually appropriated; the other stuff’s sort of on autopilot. Social Security, Medicare, interest payments, etc. So 40plus percent of that is defense spending. And that if anything has to go up. In the last two Congresses, controlled by Democrats, both parties substantially raised President Biden’s budget request for the military, understanding that this was necessary. So it’s likely to continue. That’s focusing on a smaller part. So it’s not going to be easy to achieve large savings from a modest part of the budget. But any event, global tensions are playing into our budget policy.
HARRISON: That’s a really excellent point. How all the domestic challenges we’re facing are being reinforced by global uncertainty and geopolitical tensions. So let me just talk about China, which has been mentioned a couple of times. China’s economy last year had one of the worst performances in decades for China. But since that very rapid reopening after the lockdowns, we’re seeing a resurgence, hopefully, of growth.
What’s your prediction, Dr. Obstfeld, for how China will do in 2023 and how will that affect the rest of the world economy?
OBSTFELD: Well, after a very bad 2022, it’s likely that they’ll bounce back and grow at 5 percent or better in 2023. In terms of the world economy, Chinese growth is a large fraction of global growth. So that number is forecasted to be higher by the IMF as a result of opening, significantly.
It’ll have a big effect, particularly in the Asian region on countries like Indonesia. It will also tend to push up global energy and commodity prices, which will complicate the tasks of central banks, including the Fed. I would just add a note of caution about the general celebratory atmosphere about China and China being back, because part of the problems that they’ve had have not only been from the lockdown—that was a severe problem—but from a crisis in their real estate sector, where there’s been substantial overborrowing and overbuilding, from a negative rate of population growth, which they now have. This is the aftermath of their one-child policies. It’s come home to roost. And from an increasingly author-
itative management model that I think stifles innovation and growth in the private sector, in the interest of political cohesion. We also don’t know how bad will be the human toll of COVID as the virus passes through a relatively less resistant population than what we’ve developed in Western countries.
BOSKIN: China also has very large excess capacity in some basic industries, in cement, steel, etc., that they’re going to have to deal with over time. I would also say one additional thing, as Maury was talking about geopolitical tensions and returning to more of Cold War blocs of countries, the West, nonaligned and former communist countries, is that this episode I think really should have everyone reconsidering all the problems we bemoan about democracies and the temptation to look at authoritarian countries. They can make decisions faster and so on, they can force things to happen. Well, they can also make bad decisions. And obviously that’s been happening increasingly. So for all we bemoan about our not being able to get together or solve our problems—the political polarization, etc.—I’m still betting on democracies, or other forces—demographic, catching up to the technological frontier, etc.—that we’re not going to take a lot of advantage over in the future. But just as you’re thinking of geopolitical economy models for countries to emulate, I’d be a little cautious about the benefits of being so authoritarian. Look at Putin’s latest move and [China’s paramount leader] Xi [Jinping’s] latest move. That should tell you, you can screw things up pretty badly, too.
HARRISON: Thank you. Dr. Boskin, This question is for Dr. Obstfeld. The European Union is arguing that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which included record spending on climate and energy policies, discriminates against European Union companies. Could this turn into a trade war?
OBSTFELD: This is a very interesting situation, and I think it probably will not turn into a trade war, but it’s turning into a competition of a different kind. Europe also has extensive green subsidies. But they have a system which is partly due to their decentralization, in which those are very hard for businesses to access—just amazing bu-
reaucracy, amazing delays. Businesses don’t know where to go access [the subsidies]. These European leaders are going to have a meeting next week to [consider] what to do about the Inflation Reduction Act. One likely outcome is that they will greatly simplify this system and extend their green subsidy program. There have been calls to set up a European fund so that the less prosperous countries, which traditionally have not been able to subsidize to the extent of Germany and France, can do so.
It’s a sensitive issue, because of the state aid rules within the EU, which try to preserve a level playing field by basically prohibiting state aid, were relaxed for COVID, they were relaxed for the Ukraine war, and they will probably be relaxed in some sense, or at least be brought under a new institutional structure because of the Inflation Reduction Act.
So an unintended consequence is not so much a trade war, I think, but a war in green investment and subsidies. And that may not be the most horrible outcome for the world since reducing emissions has to be a global project.
BOSKIN: Yeah, that’s an important point. Most of the growth of emissions is coming now from China and India and some other developing countries. They argue in the international negotiations that we should be helping them, and many countries are looking for trillions of dollars of transfer payments from the rich countries, saying “You put all this stuff in the atmosphere, it’s already there. Why are you trying to force us not to do it?” So they want massive aid for their own potential green transitions. That’s a really complicated geopolitical problem. To give you one example: Yes, the Inflation Reduction Act had record green subsidies and green spending. You can argue about each one, whether it was perfectly targeted or whatever. But the estimate is that if kept in place by itself, it would reduce global temperature in 2100 by nine thousandths of one degree. So we’ve got a ways to go and it’s got to include everybody, particularly the places that have immense rapid emissions growth, not just the U.S. and Europe.
MELISSA CAEN: My name is Melissa Caen. I’m a longtime political analyst, journalist, lawyer, and over the years, I’ve interviewed easily 100 elected officials. And it might surprise you to know that I don’t always get the feeling they’re telling me the truth. Sometimes they just stick to talking points.
Or what’s worse is sometimes they’ll tell you one thing off camera and then they get on camera and the wall goes up and they’re just giving you whatever they want you to hear. But our guest tonight never, ever did that. It was why I always loved interviewing her, because she told you the truth and what she told you she believes.
That’s exactly what she did. And that’s why she’s going to do it again. I always appreciated that. Even people who disagreed with her politics at least always knew truthfully what she felt and where she stood, and she’s done that for decades. This kind of candor has endeared her to her constituents.
She has fought for expanded access to abortion and restricted access to guns.
Yes, she’s fought for greater access to justice for victims of sexual assault and harassment. She has fought for Bay Area values for so many decades. She is a force of nature, and I’m thrilled to welcome her here tonight for the exit interview.
Congresswoman Jackie Spear—oh, do I get to call you congresswoman or— JACKIE SPEIER: Call me Jackie.
CAEN: I think I speak for everyone when I ask what we’re all wondering, which is, Do you have classified documents? And if not, why not? [Laughter.]
SPEIER: Very important question, because I served on the Intelligence Committee for eight years. So I went down to the bowels of the Capitol, into a whole suite of offices and rooms [with] a huge door that I could have had a rotator cuff tear. Every time I opened it, I had to leave my phone, my Fitbit, everything outside. And then you go inside, you have meetings, you have hearings, you have CIA officials and DIA officials come and testify, and you have documents that [are] stamped “top secret” in red on white paper on the cover of virtually everything.
They were numbered. You never, ever got out of there with anything.
Now, of course, it’s different for a president or a vice president, but not that different. I actually fault those who were the custodians of these documents for not having a chain of custody so that, yes, the president has this information, but it’s incumbent on the person that provided that information to have it returned, because particularly for the highest-ranking people in our country, those documents contain sources and methods and could out any number of persons that we’re using as assets in countries around the world.
So there has to be a much cleaner method by which those documents are shared with the highest-ranking people in our government, for those that serve on committees. I mean, there is a process and we follow that process, and I think that we’ve got to expect the same from the executive branch as well.
CAEN: So should we be concerned? Or there have been some arguments out there that the department’s over
A Bay Area political legend discusses her career as well as the changes she sees ahead for the institution she just departed and for the Democratic Party. Excerpted from the January 30, 2023, program
“Congresswoman Jackie Speier: The Exit Interview.”
classified.
SPEIER: There is a fair amount of overclassification of documents, and I think we won’t know the answer to that question until we see them. Now, there’s a big difference between a president who voluntarily turns over documents and one who for over a year persisted in not turning over the documents. That shouldn’t be lost on any of us. That’s theft when it’s identified that you have documents and you choose to ignore the archivist. You get that. That’s theft.
I will also say it appears that there’s not enough teeth in the law as it relates to the archivist and his ability to extract the documents he needed. He couldn’t do it. It was kind of, you know, “Please, may I?” Until he called on the FBI and the Department of Justice, there was no ability to get that.
You might wonder why it was that they ended up getting a search warrant, and they didn’t do that lightly. Merrick Garland wasn’t about to do anything that looked like it was a wild goose chase. I’m pretty certain—and I think there’s even been some references to someone on the inside staff of the president in Mar-A-Lago that provided that information to them.
CAEN: What about President Biden? Do you think that it was a good move to appoint a special counsel to look into that issue? I mean, given Merrick Garland is an appointee.
SPEIER: I think the attorney general had no choice. I think it was the appropriate action. It’s always interesting when you look at what would have been, could have been; I mean, he could have been a Supreme Court justice. He’s now serving as the attorney general. In some respects, I think [he] is doing probably a more important role right now than he might have been as a Supreme Court justice. Although if he had been on the Supreme Court, he might have had a different Dodds decision.
CAEN: You’ve been out of Congress now for a whole month. Things have gone straight to hell. [Laughter.] So were you watching the speakership battle? Like, with [champagne] glasses, laughing?
SPEIER: I wasn’t. I was tweeting. One of my tweets went, I think, viral when I said when Nancy Pelosi was the speaker, she knew how to count votes. She knew how to rein in her recalcitrant members, and she did it in stiletto heels.
CAEN: What do you make of this idea
that the Democrats were able to hammer out the speakership issues—because there were some from time to time in the caucus—and then everyone sucks it up and then you go out to vote? What goes on in those caucus meetings. Do they cry? Do they demand weird things? What’s going on behind closed doors among Democrats before you all go out and do the thing?
SPEIER: Oh, there’s something kind of funny about Democrats and caucuses. Because for the most part, what went on in the caucus was already news to the journalists before we walked out, because there were members who are always texting like this [was] going to get them brownie
points or something. A lot of the caucuses were pretty mundane.
You talked about the issues. You’d have speakers come in. It was what happened behind the scenes. It was the other caucuses, whether it was the Congressional Black Caucus or the Progressive Caucus or the Blue Dog Caucus or the New Dem Caucus. It was when they would get together and see if they could move something, and they would go to the speaker and try [to] convince her that they had the votes to mess up her schedule. Then she would always figure out that now she did have the votes.
CAEN: I saw the documentary that her daughter [Alexandria] did.
SPEIER: I was there for the opening night. I don’t know that [Alexandria’s] mom had actually seen it ahead of time. I don’t know that I would have allowed my daughter to have me on screen in my pajamas with no makeup on or talking to the vice president of the United States, fixing my bed, turning on the microwave, and doing all the important things relevant to everyday life, since she wasn’t hearing anything all that interesting on the other line.
CAEN: There’s this one scene, it has to do with the Affordable Care Act, and she’s trying to get the votes that she needs. There’s one vote that she’s having trouble with, it’s a congressperson from Indiana. So she calls
the archdiocese of the district this person represents and calls literally a higher power to get him to put some pressure on this representative.
That was just one example.
SPEIER: And you know, where he is now is the ambassador to the Vatican.
CAEN: She’s got power. I get that. But are there other examples of things like that where you’ve seen her twist arms seriously, pulling levers for recalcitrant people—because it seems like something Kevin McCarthy could use some help with?
SPEIER: She knew people’s districts. She knew the names of the members’ children. She knew what they wanted. She was a
master. And we are so lucky in this region that we had her leading our country for as long as she did.
CAEN: What is it about the Bay Area?
I mean, if you look at Pelosi and Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein, even Gavin Newsom. So many extraordinary politicians coming out of this region. Is it just something about the local politics or the forward thinking ideas?
SPEIER: For the longest time, most of the statewide officeholders in California were from Northern California, if you think about it. I think now we have [the] one secretary of state who’s from Southern California. But then again, she was appointed first. Alex Padilla would have been another example. But it’s a Democratic vote that’s very strong and very committed in Northern California. So if you can gather the votes in Northern California, you can oftentimes beat down the numbers that exist in Southern California.
CAEN: Mark Leno, who was our local supervisor and also a member of the Assembly and Senate, used to say it wasn’t even fair, because in the politics of San Francisco and the Bay Area, the entire intraparty politics among Democrats was so intense that by the time you get to Sacramento, you roll right over these people [who maybe started as] president of their PTA and now [they’re in] the Assembly, like they don’t stand a chance against folks who had to deal with the party politics that we have here in the Bay Area.
SPEIER: Well, that’s probably more true in San Francisco than in other counties, I would say. San Francisco is raw politics.
CAEN: Even today. But as you watched the speakership vote unfold, I guess what I’m trying to ask is if you could give Kevin McCarthy some advice about how to deal with members of your party that are kind of going off in different directions? What what do you think you would do in a position like that?
SPEIER: He wanted this so desperately that he really was willing to sell his soul, and that’s frankly what he did. Put your seatbelts on. This is going to be one wild ride. . . .
I think he’s going to have a hard time, but he wanted it so much and he lost it back in 2016. I guess it was when he was in line to become speaker and he had a extramarital relationship that prevented him from succeeding in that particular race.
CAEN: A simpler time, that was. Now, that doesn’t matter.
SPEIER: In fairness to him, he raised a truckload of money, got a lot of people elected, some of whom were then very happy to vote against him until they got their pound of flesh. So his hands are really tied.
CAEN: Do you miss it? . . .
SPEIER: I’m sure many of you have heard how this all evolved. It wasn’t my plan to leave Congress when I did. It was my husband’s. But I had made a promise to him that if I got sexual assault taken out of the chain of command in the military, that I would retire; and after that happened, I assumed that I could—[applause] thank you, it was a big deal—I thought that I could go and ask for a pass again. And he didn’t give me one. So I had to keep my word.
CAEN: Speaking of things that are normal now, that maybe didn’t used to be normal, it’s hard to know George Santos. I could not find another example of someone lying this hard about everything. I mean, this is not exactly the Vatican, but it seems like this is an extraordinary case. What do you make of this? And what do you think should or will happen?
SPEIER: Well you can point the fingers at a lot of people. I mean, he is a defective person. But having said that, a local weekly newspaper uncovered this, and The New York Times did not pick it up. So shame on The New York Times. Congratulations to this [other paper].
I would like to see how much money we actually on the Democratic side put into that race, because there should have been opposition research done to determine all of this. And if it wasn’t done, why wasn’t it done? You can point fingers in a number of different places. The problem now is that he’s there. He’s a vote for the speaker, and he’s not going anywhere until the U.S. attorney, the Justice Department, takes action against him, which they will because he has lied under penalty of perjury in terms of his campaign statements. And he’s probably laundered money.
So I’m sure some of that is going to come out. The problem for Kevin McCarthy now is that he sucks all of the oxygen out of the room. So whatever is their message? Their message is George Santos right now, because that’s all that people are talking about.
CAEN: As a Democrat, this is not the
worst thing that can happen, to have this [distraction on] the other side that you can be like, “Look what they’re wearing.”
SPEIER: And it’s just a sad commentary that in our society and in our culture now, lying is so commonplace. We had a president who lied thousands and thousands of times, and it was acceptable to a significant part of the population. So I think that it’s going to hurt all of us in terms of getting the work done that needs to happen in Congress. I mean, the debt limit is going to have to be raised.
CAEN: What do you make of what’s coming in terms of how that’s going to potentially be negotiated? I know there’s always a push for a clean lift of the debt limit, but is that even going to be possible?
SPEIER: I think that there has to be a clean debt limit increase. The simple way of defining it is you buy things with your credit card. [At] the end of the month, you have to either pay off that credit card statement or pay down that credit card statement. We have spent this money already. We don’t have the luxury of saying, “Oh, we’re just not [paying].” It’s the full faith and credit of this government that’s at stake here. Kevin McCarthy on “Face the Nation” yesterday said he was not going to let that happen. So let’s see. They’re going to try and extract any number of things out of it. But even when you look at the budget, when you look at how much of it is mandatory spending—it’s money for Social Security, it’s money for Medicare, it’s money for Medicaid, it’s money for Veterans Affairs— you’ve got just a very limited area of discretionary funding. It’s under discretionary funding, defense and then some of the other national parks where we actually had a government shutdown. I was really concerned about people getting their checks and all those kind of daily needs.
You know what the biggest issue was [for] the American people? It was closing the national parks. They are a jewel in our crown. They’re highly regarded by the American people. And that was a big hit. CAEN: So you think that it will probably be maybe Democrats plus a few Republican.
SPEIER: There’s probably 10 to 12 Republicans who are maybe moderates and who don’t want to see the debt limit breached by not raising it. Once they’re given the okay by Kevin McCarthy to do so, they’ll proba-
bly join the Democrats in doing it.
CAEN: There are certain pieces of legislation around abortion and gun rights that Democrats would like to see put forward, but is that pretty much shelved for the next two years now that we have a Republican-controlled House?
SPEIER: I do not expect anything on any of those issues. It’s very sad.
You know, as a victim of gun violence, I feel really passionate about this issue. And for us as a country to not have universal background checks—I mean, that’s the lowest bar, and we can’t even get that passed, even though that’s the law. The Brady Law was you had to get background checks, but that was before gun shows and before Internet purchases and before person-to-person purchases. So all of those are not subject to background checks. You absolutely need that. And once we registered machine guns—you used to be able to register machine guns. All of that came under control. So registering guns would be another important thing. Why is it when we did pass this so-called reform bill, after [the school shooting in] Uvalde last year, we couldn’t get something as simple as no assault weapons can be purchased by anyone between the ages of 18 and 21?
We couldn’t get that in. Do you know what they got in? They were patting themselves on the back because we had just broken the logjam after 30 years of not being able to get any reform legislation through on gun violence. It was a more enhanced background check if you’re purchasing an assault weapon between the ages of 18 and 21. Now, think of those who have been mass shooters who were between 18 and 21; they don’t have records, so it would not have affected their actions. They would still have been able to purchase those guns. So it’s a travesty.
I was in Europe at the time and I came back from a dinner, turned on the TV, and there were 14 kids that had died in Uvalde. Overnight, it was 21. The next day I was meeting with the head of [the equivalent to our] CIA I think I was in Denmark at the time. And I asked him how many mass shootings did they have last year. And he looked at me, kind of shrugged his shoulders, “None.” Now think of it. We have more mass shootings than there have been days in this year already. So then I came home and I had my staff do some research;
it’s about 400 million people that live in the EU. It’s 330 million people that live here in the United States. In 2020, the last year that I had data on both entities, in the EU, there were something like 2,500 deaths by gun violence. In 2020, there were 45,000 gun violence deaths in the United States. It is abnormal.
CAEN: It seems like the NRA has declined in prominence. Or maybe it’s more powerful and we’re just not seeing [it]. But it seems like they had some budgetary problem and some leadership problems and it seems to have fizzled a bit. It appears. Are they still a force? And if not, is there a new [power] or is it more dispersed now?
SPEIER: They are still a force, although they have been, I think, wounded somewhat. But there’s the Gun Owners Association now. There’s the gun manufacturers. There are more guns in this country than there are people, more than 330 million guns in this country.
CAEN: I believe you were in Half Moon Bay recently [after] the recent shooting.
SPEIER: No, I was actually in Southern California at the time.
That’s the other thing—these profiles of these two killers in Monterey Park and in Half Moon Bay, they don’t fit the profile. One was 67 and I think one was 72.
And what were the triggering events? The triggering event in Monterey Park had something to do with his ex-wife. The triggering event in Half Moon Bay was the fact that his coworkers mocked him and that his supervisor had just fined him $100 because he was using a forklift and damaged something and the hundred dollar fine put him over the edge. And in Half Moon Bay, they were all targeted. He went after people who he felt had somehow harmed him, hurt him.
So I think that there’s a lot more that we have to do. We’ve got to rein in accountability relative to guns. I think registration has got to be part of that now. And the universal background checks and not letting kids buy guns until they’re 21. You know, why does a six year old have a gun in his backpack?
Now, the other thing that we do know is that kids know when another kid has a gun or has the potential to shoot; they hear about it. That’s why these community officers are actually helpful to have on school campuses, because the kids are more likely
to go and tell them.
CAEN: Interesting. I did read that there was some knowledge beforehand; just baffling, to say the least. I guess they’re doing an investigation. And we’ll see how that fell through the cracks. But somebody did try to report.
SPEIER: I did a lot of work when I was chair of the Military Personnel Subcommittee and Armed Services. We had a huge increase in the number of suicides in Alaska. So [there were] a number of trips to Alaska last year to try and see if we could fix this situation, because it’s remote.
There are often alone. They come from Southern states, and then they’re put in this very cold environment. I had a hearing and one of the experts who spoke—when asked “What can we do?” it was amazing what he said. He said offer these service members gun safes or gun locks. Now, that sounds pretty simple, right? But just the length of time it takes to put in the combination or unlock the gun’s safe is oftentimes enough to get the person to rethink doing it. It’s impulsive. When we look at the gun deaths, of course, two thirds of them are suicides.
CAEN: Two thirds of that 45,000 number suicides? Wow.
SPEIER: So in one of these cases, it was a staff sergeant [who had] just gotten back from visiting his family, was about to go to a special program in Georgia and see some of his old buddies, went to Walmart, bought a couple of video games so they could play them, went back to his apartment to just pick up something, left the engine running, went upstairs, shot himself. For 5 hours that car was running before anyone figured out what was going on. So that impulse is something that we have to deal with as well.
CAEN: And that’s going to have to be in 2025, I suppose, now that we’ve got a Republican-controlled House, unless there are some moderates that could potentially vote with the with Democrats.
On a lighter note, are there any Republicans who sort of have a persona that they portray on Fox News or Newsmax or other really conservative outlets that you found to be sort of closeted, nice guys, nice and normal?
SPEIER: You’d be surprised how many of them are where you can sit down, have a great conversation, get to know them. Jim Banks was my ranking member on [my
committee] for a period of time. We had long conversations about his children, who had some issues. One of my children had had some learning issues. So we were talking about them. I gave him a book that I thought would be very helpful. Then you’d see him ranting, and you think you were dealing with a completely different person.
CAEN: Are there any others like that? Is Matt Gaetz secretly, like, really nice?
SPEIER: Matt Gates loves himself. And he’s only been eclipsed by our liar, George Santo.
I mean, they are provocative intentionally, and that’s pretty obvious. They say something incredibly provocative and then they fund raise off of it. That’s the M.O. CAEN: That’s something that John Boehner said: “They’re looking for the clip to play on Fox News. They’re not really necessarily looking to get something specific done.”
What is next for Jackie Speier?
SPEIER: What is next for Jackie Speier? So I just made the point over and over again that I wasn’t retiring. I was coming home to make good trouble. And that’s what I plan on doing. One of the things that I have done is I started a foundation in San Mateo County, and I seeded it with $1 million that was left in my campaign coffer. And it’s for women and children. And my goal is to eradicate childhood poverty in San Mateo County. And if we do it there, I want to see it done throughout the 93 counties.
To put it in perspective, San Mateo County is the fourth richest county in the country. There are some 3,000 counties, and we’re the fourth richest. We have 20 billionaires that live there. We have 5,000 millionaires that make $4.1 million on average, and 90 percent of their giving is nationally and internationally. So we’ve got 23,000 kids who live below the federal poverty rate of a family of four living on $27,000 a year.
We’ve got kids that are homeless. We’ve got an increase in domestic violence of 20 percent, highest increase in food stamp pick-up in the entire state. So I make that case to say that I think we have hiding in plain sight a lot of poverty. We have it here in San Francisco. We have it in counties in the Bay Area.
And yet we’re not fixing the problem. So I’m hoping to do that.
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All of us where shocked and saddened by the mass shooting deaths of farm workers in San Mateo County. Maybe it was especially horrific because it happened in your own back yard.
That brutality also exposed horrific living and working conditions—as well as credible claims of serious labor violations. But it was hardly an aberration in the long and sordid history of farm worker exploitation and oppression in this state and nation.
On the 28th of January, it was 75 years since the plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon in 1948. A DC-3 airliner with 32 people caught fire and crashed into Los Gatos Canyon in western Fresno County. The dead included 28 bracero farm workers being deported.
The Anglo pilots, flight attendant, and immigration officer were identified. But most of the farm workers were just listed as . . . “deportees.” The deportees’ remains were buried in unnamed graves by the Latino community and Catholic Diocese of Fresno.
Songwriter Woody Guthrie heard of the tragedy on the radio. The announcer reportedly said they were “just deportees.” He was incensed and wrote a beautiful tribute—“Deportee” or “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos”—later sung by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, among many others. The refrain goes:
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita, Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria; You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane, All they will call you will be “deportees.”
A professor, Tim Hernandez, recently researched the deportees, found their names, and funded a memorial gravestone at the cemetery. The deportees finally got their names back.
Almost 60 years ago, on September 17, 1963, a freight train collided with a farm labor bus outside the small farming town of Chular in the Salinas Valley. Thirty-two bracero farm workers died.
Before a similar audience at The Commonwealth Club in 1984, Cesar Chavez opened his remarks by recounting that crash. He said, “Most of the bodies laid unidentified for days. No one, including the grower who employed the workers, even knew their names.”
Forty-nine years ago, on January 14, 1974, 19 lettuce workers died when their farm labor bus careened off the road into a drainage ditch near Blythe, California. Approaching Blythe before sunrise, the bus missed a turn. Seats and farm workers were thrown to the front of the bus. Most workers died from drowning in the shallow ditch while
in Half Moon Bay brought to light the difficult conditions in which farmworkers often still live and work. Almost 40 years after Cesar Chavez’s renowned 1984 Commonwealth Club speech, his successor as president of the United Farm Workers Union, Teresa Romero, joins us to discuss the hardships and exploitation agricultural laborers face. From the March 20, 2023, program “UFW’s Romero: Why Farm Workers Suffer and How They Can Bring About Change.”
TERESA ROMERO, President of the United Farm Workers Union
IRENE DE BARRAICUA , Director of Operations and Communications, Líderes Campesinas— Moderator
trapped by the wreckage.
Twenty-four years ago, on February 11, 1999, 13 tomato workers died when a farm labor van crashed into a tractor-trailer rig in the pre-dawn darkness of west Fresno County. Instead of seats bolted to the floor, the workers sat on wooden benches with no seatbelts. Upon impact, unsecured sharp tools flew at the workers, some of whom were speared.
Five years ago, early in the morning of March 13, 2018, farm workers Santos Hilario Garcia and Marcelina Garcia Profecto—husband and wife—just dropped off their daughter at school in Delano and were heading to find work. They were undocumented. Santos, who was driving, saw lights flashing in his rearview mirror. He thought it was the police, so he stopped. When he realized they were ICE agents, the couple—fearing separation from loved ones—panicked and took off, fleeing at high speed with two ICE vehicles in hot pursuit. Santos lost control of the car, hit a utility pole, and flipped over. Both husband and wife died—leaving six orphaned kids, ages 8 to 18.
Tragedies such as these regularly befall farm workers. They usually go unnoticed. Yet, since the deaths at Half Moon Bay, some people are asking why we keep seeing these injustices. What is the cause?
In his eulogy before the families of the dead lettuce workers in 1974 in Calexico, Cesar Chavez asked if these tragedies “are deliberate.”
“They are deliberate,” he answered, …in the sense that they are the direct result of a farm labor system that treats workers like agricultural implements and not as human beings . . . They are important because of the work they do. They are not implements to be used and discarded. They are human beings who sweat and sacrifice to bring food to the tables of millions of people throughout the world.
As we weigh the historical and contemporary plight of farm workers, we can see that the San Mateo County shootings two months ago were not an exception. Rather, they were the direct result of fundamental injustice and indignity built into the system of farm labor in this state and nation—dating back more than a century and a half.
Agriculture is still one of the richest industries in California. Cash receipts for all crops surpassed $51 billion in 2021.
For more than a century and a half the profits of California agriculture have been built on the backs of generation after generation of exploited and oppressed farm
workers—often dark-skinned immigrants imported to work in our fields.
Since the mid-19th century, California fields have been worked by Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos, African Americans, the Oakies and Arkies, Mexicans again, and later Yemeni and Punjabi workers.
When farm workers rose up in protest, growers broke their strikes by pitting one race against another—using Mexicans to break strikes by Filipinos and vice versa. Growers marshaled all the social, economic, political, legal institutions in rural California to crush organizing.
Every strike was brutally broken.
Every union was defeated.
Strikers and organizers were beaten, blacklisted, deported, shot . . . killed.
Growers were so powerful that when nearly all other American workers won the right to organize into unions, to be paid a minimum wage and overtime under the New Deal in the ’30s, farm and domestic workers were—and remain—excluded.
Segregationist lawmakers demanded FDR exclude farm workers, because in the South they were largely African Americans. It was pure racism. As one Southern lawmaker put it, “You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis.”
That racist exclusion from the right to organize and be paid overtime continues to this day in most of the United States— except California, where the UFW ended the exclusion through legislation. Farm workers’ exclusion from collective bargaining ended in California in 1975, when Cesar Chavez and the UFW—with help from millions of boycotting consumers—pushed through the Agricultural Labor Relations Act.
The UFW didn’t end farm workers’ exclusion from overtime pay in California after eight hours a day until 2016.
We recently also won overtime in Oregon and Washington state.
In the UFW we have an expression: The laws on the books are not always the laws in the fields.
When horror stories emerge about farm worker abuse—such as after the San Mateo County shootings—the industry rightly observes that California has the toughest laws and rules in the nation protecting farm workers.
But too often enforcement of those laws falls far short of what is promised in statute or regulation.
Take the tragedy of Maria Isavel Vasquez Jimenez. May 14, 2008, was a hot day. Maria
Isavel, only 17, had just arrived from Oaxaca, Mexico to earn money to send home.
She had been working nine hours. There was no shade. There was no training for foremen or workers on what to do if someone got ill from the heat.
All these protections—and more—were demanded by the state of California since 2005. Back then, the United Farm Workers convinced Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to issue the first state regulations in the country to prevent death and illness from extreme heat. This was after a series of farm worker heat deaths.
At 3:40 p.m. Maria Isavel felt dizzy—and unsteady. She didn’t recognize Florentino, her 19-year-old fiancé. She passed out in his arms.
The foreman stood over them, glaring.
Maria Isavel was placed unconscious in a nearby van—with no air conditioning. It was hotter inside the van. Maria Isavel waited for the workers to finish as they relied on the same vehicle.
The driver decided she needed medical care. On the way to a clinic, the foreman called the fiancé. “If you take her to a clinic,” the foreman said, “don’t say she was working for us. Say she became sick because she was jogging to get exercise. Since she’s underage, it will create big problems for us.”
They got to the clinic at 5:15 p.m.—more than an hour and a half after Maria Isavel was stricken. An ambulance took her to the hospital. Her temperature was 108.4 degrees—far beyond what the human body can take.
Maria Isavel’s heart stopped six times in two days. Doctors revived her. On the third day her good heart stopped for the last time and efforts to revive her failed. The doctors learned she was pregnant. She probably never knew she would have been a mother.
Doctors said if emergency medical help had been summoned or she had gone to the hospital sooner, Maria Isavel might have survived. She was buried in her wedding dress.
Countless worker lives have been saved— and illnesses prevented—because of those heat standards the UFW helped win.
Today, decades after California became the first state to grant farm workers unionization rights, workers still face daunting challenges in unionizing—from growers who sternly resist the right to organize and have a union. Growers flaunt with impunity the law’s protections.
One of the most recent cases before the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board is insightful. At Premiere raspberry farm, with about 500 workers in Watsonville, the farm workers did everything right.
They organized. They went on strike. They voted for the UFW in an election held during the strike. They asked to bargain for a union contract.
The company refused to bargain at all. It refused to participate in the state’s mandatory mediation process. Under it, workers can bring in neutral state mediators to hammer out contracts when growers won’t negotiate them.
Premiere challenged the constitutionality of the mandatory mediation law, even as it was being upheld by the California Supreme Court.
Three years after workers began organizing, Premiere exhausted all its legal remedies. Within 10 days, according to the state farm labor board, Premiere “suspiciously” shut down operations. The company never intended to abide by the election results or the state-ordered union contract. The workers received only a modest financial settlement—a small fraction of what Premiere would have paid in wages and benefits had the company complied with the law.
The horrific conditions revealed by the mass shootings in Half Moon Bay are yet another reminder of why unionization remains so necessary.
“Squalid” and “deplorable” living conditions were reported in the press after the murders. We understand Cal-OSHA, the state labor commissioner’s office, and San Mateo County officials are investigating allegations of wage theft, other labor violations, and housing violations at the two farms.
Now, contrast the two Half Moon Bay mushroom farms with the unionized Monterey mushroom farm just down Highway 1 in Watsonville and Morgan Hill. Monterey Mushroom—one of the largest fresh mushroom producers in America— employs about 1,000 workers who have been working under UFW contracts for years.
The average unionized mushroom picker earns $45,000 a year with full family medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid holidays and vacations, a defined-benefit pension plan, job security, dignity, and fairness on the job, and much more.
Farm labor does not have to be this deadend, low wage, no benefit occupation. We have shown the difference the union can make.
Organizing
California took a historic step forward last year with the signing of AB 2183.
The right to vote in America was enshrined in law with passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. So too, in California the right of farm workers to vote in union elections
has been enshrined in law since passage of the historic 1975 farm labor act. Yet, when field workers try voting in a union, they are still stuck back in 1975—when just about the only way political voters could vote was at set polling places.
Under the 1975 farm labor law, agricultural workers can only vote at polling places— nearly always set on grower property. There, they must run a gauntlet of threats and intimidation and deportation—by employer foremen, supervisors, and labor contractors.
To preserve the status quo, growers argued they only want to help farm workers by preserving the right to vote in secret ballot elections—held nearly exclusively on grower property. That’s like making progressive voters of color only vote at MAGA headquarters.
The opinion editor of the McClatchy newspaper chain in California skewered these industry claims by noting that is “how absolute power over the powerless works. You deny them their rights while pretending you are doing them a favor.”
So over a two-year period, the United Farm Workers took up in California the same fight underway across the nation to protect voting rights. During their marathon campaign, farm workers gave up days of pay to lobby and protest. They spent time away from families.
Last year, workers undertook a grueling 24-day, 335-mile pilgrimage—or march—up the Central Valley to the state Capitol in the triple-digit heat of summer. They endured genuine physical hardships. I know, because I walked every step of the way with them. And I’m no spring chicken anymore.
Nearly 7,000 farm workers and supporters joined us for the final distance to the Capitol in Sacramento last August. After the threeweek march, workers and supporters held a month of vigils at the Capitol and across the state—urging the governor to sign their bill.
More broad public support was mobilized by farm workers last year than at any time in decades.
All those sacrifices by field workers and supporters convinced lawmakers to pass— and Governor Newsom to sign—a UFWsponsored bill with 50 legislative coauthors, a measure updating the 1975 farm labor law. It gives farm workers the right to vote from the comfort and security of their own homes—free from threats and intimidation and deportation. The UFW is now gearing up for new farm worker organizing and elections later this year.
This law is not a silver bullet. The desperate poverty of many farm workers, their lack of immigration status, and most recently the loss
of so much work and wages from California’s rains and floods—all mean many workers still would rather keep their heads down and work today, even in brutal conditions, than risk fighting back.
But for the first time in decades, farm workers who chose to stand up for their rights will at least be in a fair fight—without the union election process rigged against them.
The UFW has in recent years achieved much progress for farm workers—even as we know so much more work remains undone.
The UFW is helping pull the wages of many agricultural workers in some of California’s largest farming regions up above the minimum wage. Last year—for the first time—California farm workers fully benefited from the overtime law. Farm worker pay has also risen from many negotiated and re-negotiated UFW contracts. They cover vegetable, berry, wine grape, tomato, dairy, date, feedlot, and citrus workers in three states. Most of California’s mushroom industry is unionized.
Another re-negotiated UFW contract with one of the nation’s biggest vegetable producers provides pay and benefit increases for 1,500 workers. The employer pays 100 percent of the $700-per-month cost of complete family medical, dental, and vision coverage.
The average unionized fresh tomato picker in California earns about more than $38 an hour—the highest paid tomato worker in America. Unionized farm workers are still a small percentage of the overall work force. But when the union is active in an area, non-union growers are compelled to treat—and pay— people better. Our very existence improves conditions.
In 2019, the UFW sponsored bills to ban chlorpyrifos in California agriculture. This is the toxic chemical damaging the brains and lowering the IQs of infants and young children. Moving our bills through the state Capitol convinced Governor Newsom to eliminate use of chlorpyrifos that year through executive action.
With at least half of U.S. farm workers undocumented—according to the U.S. Labor Department—the biggest concern voiced by many of them today is their immigration status. It makes them so vulnerable to being abused and mistreated.
So the UFW has become a leader in the national fight for immigration reform. With our allies, we negotiated with national grower groups—and lawmakers from both parties— to craft compromise bipartisan agricultural immigration reform. It would let immigrant farm workers earn permanent legal status
and a pathway to citizenship by continuing to work in agriculture. That measure passed the U.S. House with 30 Republican votes— the most bipartisan support for any recent immigration bill. President Biden embraces it. But the proposal stalled in the Senate— like much other vital legislation—because of the filibuster. The Republicans’ hold over the House makes progress in the near future extremely hard, but we remain ready to work with anyone to achieve this vital priority.
Cesar Chavez rarely talked about the movement’s achievements. But one of the places he chose to be reflective was during his address to The Commonwealth Club on November 9, 1984. Shirley Temple Black— then president of the Club—invited Cesar. But he was initially cautious. She was a Nixon Republican. So Cesar asked his aide and speechwriter, Marc Grossman—who is with us this evening—to check it out.
Mrs. Black quickly returned his call, explaining she was a big fan. She had kept up her membership in the Screen Actors Guild after her child acting days had ended to support other actors. Years later when she needed major surgery, Mrs. Black found it was paid for because of her union membership.
Cesar’s address to The Commonwealth Club is now in anthologies of speeches by great Americans. It was the first time he read from a text—thinking that’s what politicians do. Marc convinced him some speeches are so important that every word mattered.
During the luncheon forum before a crowd of hundreds at a big hotel in the Financial District, Mrs. Black and Cesar had lunch together on the dais. They got along like old friends, sharing interests in gardening and vegetarianism.
In his remarks, he discussed traveling for years across North America while championing the farm workers. He met
countless people—especially Latinos, but people from all walks of life—who would tell him how the farm workers inspired them to be the first in their family to go to college, to become professionals or businesspersons, to run for public office.
He had a resounding message for all of us in that speech. Cesar said, “Once social change begins it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.”
We all stand on the shoulders of those who come before us. My predecessors were born in the United States. I was born and raised in Mexico—the granddaughter of a Zapotec woman whose indigenous roots go back before the Spanish conquest. I first came to this country in my 20s, seeking—like millions of immigrants—to make a better life.
My understanding of the farm workers’ struggle hails from the fact that when I came to America, I did not speak or understand English. I would only watch English television—no Spanish. I wanted to learn to speak English so badly. Every day I strived to master five to seven sentences, constantly repeating them all day.
Watching TV, I heard the word enjoy but had the hardest time figuring out what it meant. Finally, after struggling, I learned its meaning. When I did, I really enjoyed it. I appreciate what it means to come to a new country—to be exposed to a new language, a new culture, new people . . . and to learn to adapt to it all.
So, I have come to be equally proud of my Mexican and Zapotecan heritage—and my U.S. citizenship. My immigrant background is why I can uniquely relate to a farm labor work force that is now overwhelmingly immigrant, largely undocumented—and
heavily made up of women. I am also proud that the majority of the elected UFW executive board . . . are women. My work with the UFW is personal—from being a Latina and an immigrant.
Not long ago, I fasted for five days in Seattle over retaliation against dairy workers who complain about grievances such as wage theft. During the fast, I led a delegation to the Seattle headquarters of a big corporation buying from these dairies. We rhetorically pushed back against security guards trying to block us from talking with anyone. Finally, a company official came down to meet with us—in the lobby of a big skyscraper.
“There is nothing I can do,” this man exclaimed. He said we should send them our grievances—in writing. “We can’t take sides,” he added.
“We’re not asking you to take sides,” I replied. “We’re asking you to get the dairies to meet with us.” He still resisted.
Then one of the immigrant dairy workers—a woman named Josephina Luciano—stepped forward. She had been kicked in the face by a cow. Eleven of her teeth were knocked out. She nearly died. For a long time she couldn’t even kiss her three young children.
“If you won’t listen to me, then at least look at me,” Josephina demanded in Spanish as I translated. She opened wide her disfigured mouth. “I was kicked by a cow. I was in a pool of my own blood, and no one even knew how to call an ambulance. Later, my employer falsely claimed I was not a full-time worker, and I lost my workers’ compensation benefits.”
This company man soon had tears in his eyes. “There are other workers who want to share their stories,” I told him, and offered to translate.
“No, I’m from Puerto Rico,” he said. “I speak Spanish.”
Another female dairy worker spoke about how she was sexually harassed in front of her husband. A male dairy worker said he wished he was treated as well as the cows he tends.
I have a passion within me—to help Josephina Luciano and other immigrant farm workers change their lives. That’s why I do what I do.
When he was with you, Cesar said he wanted change to come for farm workers not because of charity or idealism—but because it’s the right and decent and humane thing to do for the men, women, and children who feed us all.
That mission remains unchanged. That is the cause to which we in the United Farm Workers remain committed today.
Thank you very much.
Rod and I enjoyed spending time, with friends of five decades Diana and Harold and Chip and Terry, in the California desert this winter, in the Coachella Valley around Palm Springs.
My grandmother first traveled to the desert more than a century ago, from her home in Los Angeles. Back then, the desert towns were small health resorts, where tuberculosis survivors, like my grandma Tennys, went for dry air, winter warmth and the healing, naturally hot mineral waters.
My parents continued her tradition of desert sojourns, and we visited frequently during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. At first, our destination was Desert Hot Springs, a rustic outpost where multiple mineral hot springs flow from the aptly named Miracle Hill. We stayed at modest motels or in our camper, roamed around the desert looking at horned toads and cacti, and soaked at the Miracle Pool, a giant indoor hot pool. I was intrigued by the chair on an electrically powered boom that lowered and raised people paralyzed by polio, or unable to walk for other reasons, in and out of the mineral pool.
Following our developing interest in playing tennis, we moved on to Palm Springs, where there were abundant tennis courts, but where a half-century ago life still revolved around the hot springs. Long days of competitive tennis on the public courts at Ruth Hardy Park were followed by soaking in the hot pools at the Palm Springs Spa, on Palm Canyon Drive in the middle of town. We still stayed in our camper, or later, motor home.
Visits to Palm Springs back then were all about health. Tennis, hot springs, hiking up the rugged canyon to Tahquitz Falls, swimming under the falls. Eating raw foods, snacking on dates. We purchased our almonds and dates, and Dr. Bronner’s soap and other supplies, at the Desert House of Health, an early health food emporium that was a precursor of giants like Whole Foods. Its owner, Art Hendershot, was a guru of healthy living and eating, who hosted wellness lectures at his store.
He was also one of the organizers of a six-week trip to Jamaica, in 1965, when I was 12 years old, together with former Broadway director, then Hollywood bodybuilder, trainer and health promoter Howard Inches. They were recruiting investors for papaya plantations in Florida and Jamaica. The papaya would be turned into nutritional supplements, sold through the Desert House of Health and other outlets. Our family flew, with Hendershot, the Inches and other prospective investors, to
Montego Bay in a chartered DC-3, via Texas and Florida. It was quite an adventure, but that’s another story.
DR. GLORIA C. DUFFY President & CEO
In the 1960s, my grandmother and my mom purchased a small apartment building and a few rental cottages, with a tiny one-room casita for our own use, near the classic El Mirador Hotel on the north side of Palm Springs. Two decades later, when the El Mirador had become the campus of the Desert Regional Medical Center and Palm Springs proposed to take the properties from us through eminent domain to build a parking lot, I spoke at a Palm Springs City Council meeting, asking the city to instead consider partnering with our family to develop a senior facility. I will never forget appearing before Mayor Sonny Bono. He and his fellow council members turned down our plea for cooperation, so our time of business ownership in Palm Springs ended.
Art Hendershot and his wife Alice eventually closed the Desert House of Health, leaving Palm Springs for Shasta County, where they purchased the undeveloped Big Bend Hot Springs on the Pit River, hoping to create a close-to-nature Essene community there. In the 1980s, my mom led us up to see them and to soak in the hot springs.
Gone also, for the most part today, is the emphasis on health, wellness and soaking in the hot mineral springs, in the California desert. The Miracle Pool is no more. The Palm Springs Spa is a casino. We looked for hot springs during our recent visit, without much success.
The Coachella Valley is home to more than 120 golf courses. Ruth Hardy Park still has public tennis courts, but Indian Wells has its Tennis Garden, owned by Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison, with a 16,000-seat stadium and 29 tennis courts. La Quinta, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage and other outlying resorts have become planned communities with lavish homes and golf courses. The Coachella Valley has a population of 463,000 permanent residents, and growing. There are fabulous restaurants and art galleries, which we enjoyed.
Tahquitz Canyon, along with several other canyons, is owned and maintained by the local Native American tribes, who have built trails and bridges, and keep the canyons clean and maintained, a very welcome development.
But we still found ourselves asking, “where are the springs in Palm Springs?”
“I will never forget appearing before Mayor Sonny Bono. He and his council turned down our plea for cooperation, so our business ownership in Palm Springs ended.”
SEPTEMBER 28 – OCTOBER 12, 2023
Absorb Croatia’s remarkable history and unspoiled Dalmatian coastline on this captivating 15-day journey. Travel from Zagreb to Ljubljana to charming Opatija and on to beloved Dubrovnik. Enjoy the fascinating history and Mediterranean atmosphere of the alluring Istrian Peninsula. Enjoy an optional 4-day/3-night extension to the Balkan gem of Montenegro.
$6,684 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO
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