The Commonwealth August/September 2020

Stacey Abrams • James Mattis • Robert Gates • Bakari Sellers Marlo Thomas • Phil Donahue • Chris Wallace • Arlan Hamilton

Commonwealth The

THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

MEETING THE MOMENT

Club speakers tackle racism, war and peace, marriage, nuclear history, equity and more

$5.00; free for members | commonwealthclub.org

Chile TOTA L S O L A R E C L I P S E DECEMBER 8-16, 2020

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• Experience one of Chile’s most stunning regions – laden with lakes and volcanos.

• Enjoy three nights at our comfortable tented camp directly in the “path of totality” of the total solar eclipse.

An optional post -trip extension to Patagonia is available.

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INSIDE

Commonwealth The

Aug./Sept. 2020 • Volume 114, No.4

FEATURES 8 Stacey Abrams The importance of voting 14 Chris Wallace Inside the 116 days before the bombing of Hiroshima 20 Bakari Sellers The changing world of rural Southern Black America 26 Robert Gates and James Mattis The uses and limits of American military power 32 Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue Wed for 40 years, Thomas and Donahue set out to learn the secret to longlived marriages by talking with 40 other couples 38 Arlan Hamilton

Supporting overlooked entrepreneurs DEPARTMENTS 4 Editor’s Desk John Zipperer 5 The Commons Talk of the Club On the Scene 44 Program Info About Club programs 46 InSight Dr. Gloria C. Duffy ON THE COVER: This issue we explore everything from racial justice to nuclear warfare to venture capitalism to marriage.

Photos courtesy of the speakers.

ON THIS PAGE: Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue report this issue what they learned by talking with couples about the secrets to marital longevity. Photo by R.Cole for Rob Rich/SocietyAllure.com and Drama League.

“Ray Romano is such a funny guy, and he was funny all through the interview.

Then he started talking about [when] his wife Anna was diagnosed with breast cancer, and he got very emotional about that. It was interesting to see a woman’s breast cancer from her husband’s point of view.”

—MARLO THOMAS

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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Commonwealth The

August/September 2020 Volume 114, No.4

EDITOR’S DESK

BUSINESS OFFICES

The Commonwealth, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 feedback@commonwealthclub.org

VICE PRESIDENT, MEDIA & EDITORIAL

John Zipperer

FOLLOW US ONLINE facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub @cwclub youtube.com/commonwealthclub commonwealthclub.org

ADVERTISING INFORMATION John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, (415) 597-6715, jzipperer@commonwealthclub.org The Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105. Periodicals postage paid at San Francisco, CA. Subscription rate $34 per year included in annual membership dues. Copyright © 2020 The Commonwealth Club of California.

P O S T M A S T E R : S e n d a d dre s s changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105; (415) 597-6700; feedback@commonwealthclub.org EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue.

Program transcripts and questionand-answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations.

Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub.org/watchlisten, or via our free podcasts on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or Spotify; watch videos at youtube. com/commonwealthclub.

Published digitally via Issuu.com.

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Photo by Geralt

By the Numbers

M

ath has never been my strong suit. That might explain at least part of why I ended up in the editorial and media worlds, rather than in the realm of science, which remains a love of mine but involves a bit too many numbers and formulas.

However, sometimes looking at numbers can be an enjoyable experience even for someone like me. This month I want to share some facts and figures that will give you a sense of how your Club has successfully continued to carry out its civic mission and to reach more people even though we had to cancel in-person programming.

So let’s look at the numbers.

150+ Number of live-streamed, online-only Commonwealth Club programs over the first several months of shelter-in-place.

1.5 million Number of downloads of Club podcasts for the months of May–July 2020.

4,428 Number of registered “attendees” at “Parenting in Support of Black Lives: How to Build a Just Future for Kids” (June 18), our

most-attended online program so far during the pandemic era.

78,000 Minutes of Club videos viewed on Facebook from May–July 2020.

57 million Total viewers of Global Pride, a live 24-hour worldwide broadcast in late June facilitated by The Commonwealth Club’s live-stream experts (see page 7).

2.7 million Number of views of Commonwealth Club videos on YouTube just for the months of May–July 2020.

3 Number of “pilot” episodes we have now released of our new podcast/radio program “Insights,” featuring a new format plus episode themes. We say the program has “Silicon Valley DNA.” Give it a listen and let us know what you think.

Learn more at commonwealthclub.org/ events/2020-07-24/insights-radio-program JOHN Z I P P E R E R VP, ME DIA & ED I T O RI AL

The Commons

TALK OF THE CLUB

Mural with a Message

W

hen the Bay Area shut down to rein in the spread of the coronavirus, the Club’s waterfront headquarters in San Francisco acquired a new look. To add some color to the street of boarded-up buildings, the Club commissioned a local artist to paint a mural on its Embarcadero barrier facade (see photo above).

The mural was painted by artist Ian Ross, born and raised in Marin County in a family of artists.

He designed the mural shortly after the killing of George Floyd, and if you look at the colorful image, you will see a subtle message. You can see more of Ross’s work at ianrossart.com.

Virtual Reception

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he Commonwealth Club’s Farmer Gallery features exhibits all year long from local artists who work in a variety of styles and formats.

The exhibits are often opened or closed with a reception and discussion with the artist.

But what do you do when shelter-in-place

Phillip Hua rules mean that no one can see the exhibited artwork and no one can gather for a glass of wine and a chat with the artist?

You go online. On August 5, the Club’s Arts Member-Led Forum hosted a virtual reception for artist Phillip Hua, whose “All That Glitters” exhibit is currently hanging in the Farmer Gallery. Attendees poured themselves a glass of their favorite wine and viewed Hua’s live conversation with Arts MLF organizer Robert Melton.

Proud Graduate

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o complete a final project for his graphic design degree from San José State University, Elijah Allen needed to design a poster for a mock Club event. He researched the Club, designed his poster, and contacted us about getting some on-site access. At left, Allen with his poster in front of the Club; at right, detail from the poster.

LEADERSHIP OF THE

COMMONWEALTH CLUB CLUB OFFICERS Board Chair Evelyn Dilsaver Vice Chair Martha Ryan Secretary Dr. Jaleh Daie Treasurer John R. Farmer President & CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy BOARD OF GOVERNORS Robert E. Adams Willie Adams John F. Allen Scott Anderson Dan Ashley Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman Harry E. Blount John L. Boland Charles M. Collins Dennis Collins Kevin Collins Mary B. Cranston LaDoris Cordell Susie Cranston Dr. Kerry P. Curtis Dorian Daley James Driscoll Joseph I. Epstein Jeffrey A. Farber Dr. Carol A. Fleming Leslie Saul Garvin Paul M. Ginsburg Hon. James C. Hormel Mary Huss Lata Krishnan John Leckrone Dr. Mary Marcy Lenny Mendonca Michelle Meow Anna W.M. Mok DJ Patil Donald J. Pierce Bruce Raabe Skip Rhodes Kausik Rajgopal Bill Ring Richard A. Rubin George M. Scalise Charlotte Mailliard Shultz Todd Silvia George D. Smith Jr. David Spencer James Strother Hon. Tad Taube

Marcel TenBerge Charles Travers Kimberly Twombly-Wu Don Wen Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Brenda Wright Jed York Mark Zitter PAST BOARD CHAIRS AND PRESIDENTS * Past Chair ** Past President Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman* J. Dennis Bonney** John Busterud** (deceased) Maryles Casto* Hon. Ming Chin** Mary B. Cranston* Joseph I. Epstein** John Farmer* Dr. Joseph R. Fink** Rose Guilbault* Claude B. Hutchison Jr.** Dr. Julius Krevans** (deceased) Anna W.M. Mok* Richard Otter** Joseph Perrelli** Toni Rembe** Victor J. Revenko** Skip Rhodes** Renée Rubin** Richard Rubin* Robert Saldich* (deceased) Connie Shapiro** Nelson Weller** Judith Wilbur** Dennis Wu** ADVISORY BOARD 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 Ray Taliaferro Nancy Thompson

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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Leave Your Legacy Make a lasting impact through a planned gift.

Gifts Through Wills • Charitable Trusts • Gift Annuities • IRA / Retirement Plan Designation

To learn more about how to leave a legacy gift to The Commonwealth Club please contact Kimberly Maas at kmaas@commonwealthclub.org or (415) 597-6726.

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The Commons

ON THE SCENE 3 4

1 2 5

Global History

The Club provides livestream video for a 24-hour global celebration

W

hen the pandemic forced the cancellation of public gatherings, it meant organizers of Global Pride—an annual celebration of LGBTQ rights—had a choice: skip the 2020 event or put it all online.

Michelle Meow, former president of San Francisco Pride and the host of “The Michelle Meow Show,” was one of two executive producers for the program, and she tapped the online video expertise of The Commonwealth Club. And on June 26–27, for more than 24 hours, the Club’s AV team facilitated a nonstop, live broadcast of videos from around the world. It included activists; snapshots of LGBTQ life and challenges in many countries; appearances by Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Leo Varadkar, Elton John, Laverne Cox, and many others; musical

6 performances; and much more, bringing together people from around the world for a day of connection and celebration.

Photos: u One of our video control stations; the program incorporated live sign language from interpreters located around the world. v Michelle Meow, wearing her face shield, pauses during hour 16 of the live-stream. w The control room. x Livestream engineer Adam Anderson monitors the live video feeds. y The team. Back row, left to right: Jethro Patalinghug, Michelle Meow, Orawan Chanpanya; front row: Ron deHarte, Mark Kirchner, Spencer Campbell, Adam Anderson, Jeremy Lassalle and Arnav Gupta. z There was no in-person audience in our Taube Family Auditorium, but the marathon broadcast reached more than 57

million viewers around the world. photo credits: Spencer Campbell (5); Mark Kirchner (4); and John Zipperer (1, 2, 3 and 6).

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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STACEY ABRAMS Fighting for a Fair America THE RIGHT TO VOTE

DAN PFEIFFER: In [her new] book, Stacey chronicles how the is a central tenet of democracy, right to vote and the principle but that right has been abridged of democracy as we know it has in increasingly brazen ways. been and continues to be under Georgia politician and activist attack, even now in 2020— Stacey Abrams explains her maybe especially now in 2020. efforts to protect and expand This a very interesting time in voting rights. From the June 22, American history. . . . I want to start by reading to you an official 2020, online Inforum program statement from the president “Stacey Abrams: Our Time Is of the United States: “Because Now.” of mail-in ballots, 2020 will STACEY ABRAMS, Founder, Fair be the most rigged election in Fight Action and Fair Fight 2020; our nation’s history—unless Author, Our Time Is Now: Power, this stupidity is ended. We Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair voted during World War One America and World War Two with no problem, but now they are using In Conversation with DAN COVID in order to cheat by PFEIFFER, Co Host, “Pod Save America” using mail-ins!”

This is part of a larger effort by the president to cast doubt on the elections. I wanted to ask you why he’s wrong about mail-in ballots, and why you’re such a big supporter of making them part of our plan.

ABRAMS: Okay. Number one, every state in the country has some form of mail-in balloting. There are five states that do universal mail-in balloting— universal vote by mail. There are 34 states that have no excuses [required to vote by mail], including that five. There 16 states that do mail-in balloting, but they require an excuse—usually age, infirmity, permanent disability, or you’re not going to be at home. It varies; there are four that are hyper-restrictive. But every state in the country does this. What is different is that we have a disease that is communicable through contact, through [short] distance. So unlike World War I, World War II, we’re much more in the Spanish flu epidemic stage, and vote by mail is one of the few ways that you can preclude the likelihood of contracting a disease while participating in democracy. So we want vote by mail because vote by mail allows as many people as possible to not be in line, to send in their ballots, to participate in democracy, democracy

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AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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that ran during World War I, World War II, during the Civil War. We’ve never had to stop it, but this allows as many people as possible to not communicate a disease to another person because they have no choice.

We have to do that because there are portions of our population that have no choice. There are those who are in the disabled community for whom going to the polls is the only way they can cast their ballot with any degree of privacy. There are machines that allow them to actually cast a private ballot. We have people who have language barriers. It is illegal in a number of states for them to get help, so they have to go to a polling place to get the assistance they need. We have people who are homeless, where vote by mail—or, more important, vote from home—does not work. And because we are in the early throws of an eviction crisis, we know by November a lot of folks will simply not be able to get access to their absentee ballots, because they’re going to be displaced. They’re going to likely need to show up at a polling place to cast a ballot.

The final group are people who either try to vote from home and couldn’t do it or folks who just don’t trust it, which is a legitimate concern, given that African American and Latino voters are twice as likely to have their absentee ballots rejected.

Young people are five times more likely to have their absentee ballots rejected. So are communities like places in Georgia, where when a whole community came together to elect Black people to the school board, the 12 organizers found themselves arrested when charged with 120 felonies for following the law with absentee ballots. There’s a little bit of suspicion. So we allow for that suspicion by letting them go in person.

The whole point is vote by mail clears out the lines so that those who need to be in line can be socially distanced and can vote without having to wait in line for 8 to 12 hours. That’s why it works.

The second thing I’ll say is this: Donald Trump is a fraud. When it comes to this issue in particular, he votes by mail. His family votes by mail. His staff votes by mail. He does not like vote by mail because he has discovered that is easy, it’s safe, and that it’s convenient. One of the only true things I’ve

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ever heard him admit in public, he said that if vote by mail was used in America to the extent possible, he would not win. I would love to prove him to be a truth teller for once in American history.

So that is why vote by mail is so important.

PFEIFFER: Donald Trump votes by mail, his family votes by mail, we found out today Mike Pence votes by mail. And they think that’s totally fine, but it’s not okay for other people. Talk about . . . this two-tier democracy that Republicans want us to live in.

ABRAMS: I would even say there are three tiers. There’s the protected folks for whom voting has never been a question. They’ve never had their identities challenged, they’ve never had their access challenged, they’ve never had their legitimacy challenged, and they’ve never had their votes challenged.

You have the second tier, where I operate.

I’ve been able to vote most of my life without impediment, but in the last two attempts I’ve made to cast a ballot, it’s been problematic.

Then you have this third group for whom voting requires encountering so many obstacles that either you become exhausted by the process or worse, you become convinced it’s not worth it.

I went to vote in 2018 and was told that I’d already cast a ballot, that I voted absentee, which I hadn’t. I had never voted absentee before in my life. Luckily I had a phalanx of cameras behind me and knowledge within me. So I could explain the situation and work with the poll manager to get the situation resolved. But if I were a new voter, I would never have understood how to navigate that labyrinth of rules, and I would have been afraid to do so, because that’s how most disadvantaged or marginalized communities encounter [these challenges]. They either become hostile or they become afraid. So one of those challenges is making sure that people feel that they have the authority to correct the problems. Typically most people are in that third category and they don’t think they can. This year, I tried to vote by mail. My absentee ballot arrived eventually, and the return envelope was sealed shut. So I had to become one of those people who went to vote in line on election day, because even though I could call the secretary of state, I

could not get a return envelope.

So the two-tiered system or three-tiered system is so dangerous because the tiers are based on whether or not you want progress, whether you believe that you should be included in this body politic and whether they think you’re the right kind of people, because most of the voter suppression tactics are targeted at communities of color, young people and poor communities. That is not by accident, because these are the communities that have been for so long kept out of our political process and who are clamoring to get in. They are terrified that their admission is going to change the power dynamic— because it would.

PFEIFFER: When you hear stories like the example you just gave about your returned ballot being sealed, or the Democratic nominee for governor trailed by the press being misidentified on the voter rolls as someone who had already voted, it seems like our electoral system—I think first and foremost particularly in Georgia, but all across the country, because the most egregious examples we know about are from Georgia, but we hear about them all over the place, even in places with Democratic governors—it seems like incompetence, but it’s not just incompetence. You talk a lot in your book about how it’s malevolence, it is behind incompetence.

ABRAMS: I appreciate you mentioning Democratic governors, because there’s benign voter suppression that tends to happen because good intention meets calamity or challenge. We’ve seen that. What happened in Wisconsin—you had a good Democratic governor who ran into the buzzsaw of Republicans who did not want voters to vote. While he oversees the state, he does not oversee the voting system.

In Georgia, we had incompetence and malevolence and malfeasance that operated together; there was nothing benign about it. So 2018, I declared that I’m not going to challenge the outcome of my election, not because I was happy with the outcome, but because I understood that the minute a politician challenges an election, all of the bad actions become about that person’s ambition. It was important to me that everyone understood I wasn’t fighting to

make myself governor. I wanted to fight to make the system better.

That’s why I sued the system instead of suing for my own election. To be clear, I was very, very, very intentional about saying I acknowledge the legal sufficiency, but I will never concede that the election was right. That has caused some consternation on actually both sides of the aisle, mostly on one side. [Laughter.] But what happened in the aftermath was there were all these think pieces about how it wasn’t possible and how I was just making it up—until two Tuesdays ago. When people saw in real time in Georgia, 8-hour lines, 20 counties had to get judicial orders to extend their time.

Thousands of people, tens of thousands, never got their absentee ballots they requested—that they were told to request by the secretary of state. The incompetence was he actually did the right thing in cooperation with Democrats telling them to apply for the ballots, but his incompetence was that he then ceded out the process to a third party who couldn’t be responsive to the voters who needed their help.

Then you had the overlay of the existing voter suppression apparatus, the suppression that exists because of the questions: Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast your ballot? And can your ballot be counted?

And in Georgia, we continue to have challenges with being on the rolls. We still have voter purges that happen. We still have

some form of exact match, although we’ve been able through litigation to mitigate some of the harm. People couldn’t cast their ballots because either their ballots never arrived, or your ballot arrived [but] you couldn’t use it, or they shut down your polling places, and that meant that we had 6- to 8-hour lines, and we also had inoperable machines, which gets to: Does your vote actually count? We had tens of thousands of Georgians who were given provisional ballots or not given ballots at all. We had people who stood in line for six hours and then finally had to go pick up their child to go to work.

What happened in Georgia was a singular example of what happens across the country in different iterations. Georgia is particularly bad at democracy, but we’re not the only state that has this problem. The reason it was so important to see what happened in Georgia was that when you break the machinery of democracy to target Black and brown communities, the problem is eventually the machinery breaks. We had white Republican counties that had the same problems, maybe not to the same extent, but they finally had to admit that voter suppression is real and that whether it happens through incompetence or malfeasance, it’s just as effective, and just as nefarious.

PFEIFFER: You look at what happened in Georgia recently, or what happened in Wisconsin, right? Or what we’re very worried about happening in Kentucky, in

Stacey Abrams with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2019. Photo by the Office of U.S. House Speaker.

New York [in] those primaries. What can be done between now and November to limit the amount of chaos or to make voters feel more secure about their own personal safety and going to vote, but also faith that it is as close to a fair election as this country is able to muster in 2020?

ABRAMS: The first thing is making sure that we know what the problems are, and the best way to know what problems are is to test. So we need to think about these primaries as beta tests. They are telling us in 2020 what the problems are in our electoral system. In Georgia, apparently the problem is voting. You know, that just doesn’t seem to work. [Laughter.] In Wisconsin, we had a [U.S.] Supreme Court that joined with the state supreme court and with the state legislature to say that lives don’t matter and that you should risk your life to cast your vote because we are too lazy and too mean to allow you to use a mechanism we put in place for exactly this reason.

What’s going to happen in Kentucky tomorrow—I know a lot of people have heard about the closure of the polling places, and there’ve been a lot of people vouching for the aggressive vote-by-mail system that was actually authorized by the Republican secretary of state and very much supported AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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in his way by Governor [Andrew] Beshear. Alexander Hamilton was kind of, you know, people could not cast a ballot. If you live in He has tried his best to get as many people coming into fashion, when he created the a rural community and what was 10 miles to vote. But that’s why I go back to my sense that we, as a nation, we band together away is now 50 miles away, it might as well original point. It’s not just about people to finance one another, because the federal be on the moon. So we have to recognize that being able to vote by mail. It is about people government in times of crisis has the only the primaries are how we learn what we need being able to vote in the way that is best for ability to really solve these problems. We for the general. them. That’s how democracy is supposed to need the Heroes Act to pass. [The Health And I want to say just a moment of thank work. You’re supposed to be able to allow a and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency you to you and the guys that Crooked Media, voter to meet the moment. If that moment Solutions Act—HEROES Act—was passed by because we through Fair Fight had been in means you can vote from home, great. But the U.S. House of Representatives in May 2020; place in 18 states, able to gather the data and if it doesn’t, then it is the obligation of the it authorizes spending $3 trillion in response to inform voters, build volunteer lists, do the state to provide an alternative. The challenge the COVID-19 pandemic—Ed.] The Heroes advocacy because you helped us get there, in Kentucky is that the alternative looks Act is the only way we can use these primaries because we knew the primary was going to to be remarkably insufficient, particularly as proof points that without that money, be necessary to understand the general. We given the legitimate distrust that African November is going to be a calamity. But didn’t know it was going to be necessary to Americans have of vote-by-mail, and because with those resources, we can scale up, vote understand a pandemic that was crushing this is a brand new system. There’s some folks by mail so everyone who wants to [can] vote democracy, but we knew something was who are first adopters; they go out going to go wrong. there the minute there’s a new tool. “The Heroes Act is the only way we can PFEIFFER: You’ve mentioned two Then there are the folks like me; I is what is called “exact use these primaries as proof points that things—one only have an iPhone 7 because they match” and another, a very related will no longer give me a 6. And I without that money, November is going situation, which is historic distrust didn’t even go with the S, ’cause of mail-in balloting in the African to be a calamity.” that just seems too newfangled to American community. Explain me. So we have to recognize that how exact match [of] signature has the operation of voting has to meet people by mail, which will be even more than we’re been used to disenfranchise voters of color, where they are. You don’t have to create seeing in these primaries. And the primaries in particular Black Americans? special opportunities, but the ones that they are telling us a lot of people—Democrat, ABRAMS: Exact match is actually a process are used to—you don’t get to pull the rug Republican, independent, agnostic—they I think Georgia, Florida, and a couple of out from under them without giving them all want to vote by mail. other states use. It was pioneered by [former This tells us what they need. But it also Kansas secretary of state] Kris Kobach and a a legitimate alternative. And vote-by-mail tells us we’re going to have to create early few others, where you have to exactly match is not a legitimate alternative for everyone.

But the other reality is states are cash voting in a lot of states so that people can go your identity to some random database strapped. They are buckling under the and vote and not risk their lives. That we’re in order to be allowed to register to vote. economic collapse that is the current going to have to have in-person voting, and We’ve been able to mitigate that harm in economy driven by Donald Trump and his we’re going to have to maintain the polling most states. It’s still a terrible, horrible idea. inability to acknowledge that a pandemic was locations for in-person voting, because people Racially discriminatory. Captured 53,000 upon us. So each county, each city, each state don’t just want to go vote near their homes people in Georgia in 2018, 80 percent of has had to grapple in their own way. The tax just because it’s fun; it’s because they often whom are people of color, 70 percent of dollars that aren’t flowing are not flowing lack the transportation. They often lack the whom were African American. to the local administrators who have to run ability to get somewhere else. In Georgia we But then you have the scourge of signature these elections, to the counties, to the states. know that because of the 214 polling places mismatch. Signature mismatch says that But we anticipated this back when shut down in 2018, between 54–85,000 when you get that absentee ballot, when

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you sign the back swearing that it is you who filled out that ballot and you send it in, a poll worker then tries to match your signature to the last signature they have on file for you, whatever signature that is. Now in some states, it’s the signature you provided months ago; in other states it’s a signature you provided 30 years ago when you got your driver’s license or you first got your voter ID card, your voter registration card. This untutored person is going to use the “Forensic Files” episode she saw on television the night before and she’s going to match your signature to the things that she sees. And it’s usually women who are poll workers—I’m not being gender-biased. They’re going to match these things up.

Every forensic scientist will tell you it is junk science, that it is nearly impossible for people to do this, because your signature differs based on the implement you use, the surface you’re writing on, and the surface beneath the surface you’re writing on. As I put it, my signature doesn’t match from CVS to Kroger, and yet in a number of states, this mismatch is used to disqualify applications.

And guess what? It is most often used to disqualify applications of African Americans, Latinos, and young people. Black and Latinos—it’s twice as likely to kick your absentee ballot out. And for young people, it’s five times more likely that something’s going to cause your absentee ballot to be rejected.

It is junk science that tells you nothing. It just makes people feel better. But if this is the first time you voted by mail, if you go through this process and then your vote is rejected—and they don’t tell you it’s because it’s your signature, they just say your vote’s been rejected, if they tell you at all—why would you then invest in a process where when you finally decide to try it, they tell you not that it didn’t work, but that you failed?

And that’s what is so insidious about voter suppression, signature mismatch, polling place closures. It all makes the voter feel like they did something wrong. And if they are the mistake, then no one is responsible.

We know that we hire people to make this work and that if they are not willing to do their jobs, they should not have their jobs.

And their fundamental job is protecting and engaging us in our democracy.

PFEIFFER : How do you have [a] conversation in 2020 with someone who is afraid to go vote either for health reasons or because of fear that their vote will not count?

ABRAMS: One of the most effective ways to fight fear is to call it what it is, to acknowledge it’s either legitimacy or it’s fallacy. People are right to be afraid of the process of voting in America, particularly if they are in a community that’s been targeted. So part of my mission since 2018 has been to serve as a clarion call to say, “It’s not in your head. They really are after you.” Because when you shift the notion from paranoia to awareness— paranoia makes you feel bad, but it also convinces you there’s no solution. Awareness tells you how to prepare. So talking about voter suppression, debunking the myths of voter fraud, is how we prepare people to know they’re going to have to work hard. It’s not fair; it’s not right; but it is necessary.

The second part then is to tell them what else can happen. It’s not just vote by mail, but in-person early voting and voting day-of. and we need people to know they have these options so they can pick the best option for them and so they can demand the options they need. If the Heroes Act passes the Senate, that act will guarantee that in every state in the nation you have absentee balloting, early in-person voting and inperson voting on the day-of.

But then the third is to remind people why

we vote in the first place. I’m very appreciative of being considered a voting rights warrior, a champion. Voting is an action.

I do this work because I grew up poor and Black in Mississippi, because I lived poor and Black in Georgia, because I’m now still Black, but I’m no longer poor, and I want other people to have that opportunity because it’s so much better on this side. And the only way we get here is through changing policies.

I do this because I have a brother who has been in and out of the carceral system, in and out of mental health challenges, and in and out of drug addiction, and I want him to get the help he needs. He is finally able to be stable and he’s in a great program, but that’s because I’ve had opportunities that most people don’t have. I need everyone to have the opportunities I’ve been able to access for my brother.

I want voting to happen because the world we need will change and become closer to that world only if we vote.

T he s e s y s t e m s t h a t p e ople a r e demonstrating against and rightly so that we are decrying and rightly so, these systems are people. People make these choices, people pass laws, people break laws. People decide whether these laws are stupid and need to go, and whether these laws are good and need to be reinforced. We have to use voting to change the people.

So the third thing I will tell folks is we have to vote because our lives actually depend on it. We have seen the trailer for what is to come and the apocalypse of a second term of Donald Trump and a second governing rein of Mitch McConnell. We know what they’re willing to do to the courts. It is worth risking something, because we know that the consequence of inaction is that evil will reign.

And that’s something I’m just not willing to live with.

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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THE FIRST NUCLEAR WAR Chris Wallace recounts the 116 days before America dropped an atomic bomb on Japan WHEN HARRY S TRUMAN BECAME PRESIDENT,

he learned that the United States was nearly ready to use the most powerful weapon ever devised. The decision to use it would be his. From the June 17, 2020, online program “Fox News Anchor Chris Wallace.”

CHRIS WALLACE Anchor, Fox News Sunday; Author, Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the 116 Days that Changed the World In conversation with LANHEE CHEN David and Diane Steffy Fellow in American Public Policy Studies, The Hoover Institution

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LANHEE CHEN: Chris Wallace joined Fox news in 2003 and became the first journalist from the network to moderate a general election presidential debate in 2016.

Over his career, Chris has covered nearly every major political event and had exclusive interviews with world leaders, including Russian president Vladimir Putin, French president Emmanuel Macron, President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump’s first interview since being elected.

Photo by Antonychris1004

Chris, over to you for some introductory remarks about your book.

CHRIS WALLACE: I have to say that having this book tour during the age of COVID [is] a little bit different, because I was expecting to be seeing all of you in person. Now I’m kind of glad I’m doing virtual life, because it is saving some wear and tear. But I have to say that I really did want to come to The Commonwealth Club in person. I’ve been hearing about it for years and I’ve covered, not as a direct witness, but covered events or news that were made at The Commonwealth Club. So I very much wanted to be there. I hope when this is all a distant and bad memory that you’ll have me back in person.

I’d tell you a little bit briefly about how I came up with the idea for Countdown 1945.

I had thought for some period of time that I wanted to write what, for lack of a better term, I would call a history thriller. I think so much of history is written, “We know

what happened, here’s why it happened,” and there’s a kind of 2020-hindsight about it. But as it was happening, obviously there were momentous decisions being made, a lot of tension and a lot of uncertainty.

I thought what a more interesting way to tell the story. And I specifically came up with the idea of Countdown and that, if you could find a beginning place and an end point, then you could count down the key moments in that period of time.

But I didn’t have the moment. I got it in a kind of a curious way actually, with a San Francisco native, in February of 2019. It was the day that Donald Trump was going to deliver that year the State of the Union speech, and Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, invited a number of us over for what’s called a prebuttal, which is basically like a rebuttal, only you say everything that is wrong before the other person has even said it. Both parties do it.

In any case, Speaker Pelosi invited us to a

room that I had never been [in], even though I covered the House back in the late seventies for a year and a half, called the Board of Education. It was this hideaway that Sam Rayburn, when he was the speaker of the House, used in the ’40s, ’50and ’60s. The Board of Education was where he would bring in some of his political cronies in the House to talk shop or to plot strategy or to have our bourbon and branch water—and maybe all three. So she was telling the group—and frankly, I think I was the most excited of this small group of television anchors—that we were in the Board of Education.

And she said—we were all sitting at this table—at the other end of the table, that was where Harry Truman was [when] he’d been told the White House was looking for him.

He dialed the White House up and he was told, Get to the White House just quickly and quietly as possible. He hung up the phone and he said,Image “Jesus Christ in general

by TKTKTK AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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President Harry S Truman. Photo by Edmonston Studio/Library of Congress

Jackson,” which I felt was a kind of curious exclamation.

[I had the idea for my book], the 116 days from when Truman becomes president to when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Just very briefly to give you an introduction, just to day one, April 12, 1945: Truman gets the call to go to the White House. He has been vice president for 82 days, but has basically been shut out by FDR and by his war cabinet. He had only met privately, although he was the vice president, with President Roosevelt twice in those 82 days.

So he goes to the White House thinking that he’s going to meet with Roosevelt, that Roosevelt must’ve come back from Warm Springs, GA, where he was taking a rest after the Yalta conference, and that somehow he had snuck back into town and for some

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reason he wanted to meet with Truman. So he gets to the White House, is driven up to the North Portico, the ushers put him in the presidential elevator to go up to the second floor. When he gets there, he’s greeted by the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who says to him, “Harry, the president is dead.” Truman, who thought he was coming to speak to the president, now realizes he is the president.

And he says to Mrs. Roosevelt, “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

And she says, “Harry, is there anything we can do to help you? Because you’re the one in trouble now.”

I knew that the, the story would be interesting the 116 days, but there are surprises and wonderful, almost novel-like details in every day, on almost every page of the book. So he’s sworn in as president. They

call the cabinet, they called congressional leaders, they call the chief justice, Harlan Stone, and they have to find a Bible. They can’t find a Bible in Roosevelt’s White House. They finally locate a Gideon in the desk of the chief White House usher; it’s brought into the cabinet room. They stand in front of the mantle at one end of the room, and Harlan Stone says, “Do you, Harry Ship Truman—” thinking that the “S” in Truman’s [name] stands for “Ship,” which was, a paternal family name.

But of course, as I’m sure many of you know, the “S” actually stood for nothing.

So Truman corrects him and says, “I, Harry S Truman,” and they do the oath. Then stone realizes that as he was doing the oath, Truman was holding the Bible in his left hand, and he had his right hand on top of

“Henry Stimson took Truman into a private room. ‘I need to tell you about a massive project, a top secret project to create the most powerful weapon in history.’”

the Bible. So now we asked to do it all over again, putting his hand up so we can swear and take the oath.

Well, anyway, that happens. He tells his cabinet, he wants them all to stay on. He says, “I want your unvarnished advice until I make a decision. And then I want your complete loyalty and support.”

Everybody starts to leave except for Henry Stimson, the 77-year-old secretary of war. He had served five presidents, Truman would be as sixth. Stimson takes him into a private room and says, “I have something very important to tell you.” And he says, “I need to tell you about a massive project, a top secret project to create the most powerful weapon in history.”

And that is literally the first that Harry Truman learned about the existence of the Manhattan Project to build an atom bomb.

Well, that’s all that Stimson tells him, he says, “I’m going to leave. I want you to settle in. I’ll brief you on this project.”

And Truman doesn’t make too much of it, because he’s so overwhelmed. He’s now the president, he’s now the commander in chief of the U.S. war effort to defeat the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific. And this is just one more boulder on his back. So he goes home and says, “I figured the best thing I could do is get a good night’s sleep and come back and face the music.”

CHEN: One of the remarkable things about the book is it does read like a thriller, and beyond that you get this tapestry of people that’s sort of woven together really beautifully.

I want to start by asking about Harry Truman, because he is one of the figures obviously at the center of this. Truman remarks at one point, “I was just a county judge 10 years ago,” and now all of a sudden he’s thrust into being the leader of the United States and with the incredible responsibility he learns about what this atomic bomb project. Did you get a sense in researching the book or thinking about the book, what prepared Truman to step into these shoes? I mean, these massive shoes, FDR, in such a critical time in American history?

WALLACE: Well, in a sense he wasn’t prepared. There’s a famous nickname that Truman has had over the years, “the accidental president.” He got on the ticket in the summer of 1944 [at] the Democratic

convention, because the Democratic Party power brokers thought that Henry Wallace, who was the current vice president, was too far to the left. A lot of them were worried that Roosevelt was not going to survive a fourth term—and clearly he didn’t get through more than three months of it—and that whoever the vice president was would be the president. They didn’t bring this up with Roosevelt, who thought he was going to live through the war and for a good time thereafter, but they wanted to get Wallace out and put somebody else in.

The basic reason they chose Truman was because they thought he would hurt the ticket the least. Truman, in fact, went to the convention in Chicago planning to nominate Jimmy Byrnes—who had been a senator [and] who had been a Supreme Court justice, now he was handling the Office of War Mobilization—for vice-president. But the party really forced it on Truman. And he stepped into the job.

I mean, I think you can say his justice, inherent common sense and ability. He wasn’t a neophyte. He had been a county judge in the Western part of Jackson County in Missouri for years, and he’d served 10 years in the Senate. So he wasn’t totally unprepared, but I don’t think anybody thought he’s ready to step into the job right now, but he did, and he was famously decisive. In fact, one of the things that everybody noticed within the first 10 days, he had put his mark on the presidency. When they had cabinet meetings, Roosevelt used to regale the cabinet with long stories and not much got done. Henry Wallace stayed on in the cabinet after he was ousted as vice president; he stayed on as Roosevelt’s secretary of commerce. He said, “I think sometimes [Truman] had a decision before he’s got a thought.” But he had no problems making decisions.

CHEN: Early on in the book, you introduce the character of Dr. [J. Robert]

Oppenheimer, who obviously is key to this as well, because he’s sort of the scientific lead in New Mexico who’s looking after a lot of this.

You also introduce Gen. [Leslie] Groves, a military person who is largely responsible for the project. I wanted to ask a little bit about the civil–military relationship, because it’s been in the news recently with everything that’s going on with President Trump, but I’m kind of curious to get your take on what enabled that relationship. It’s a very interesting relationship between the two of them, because they, at least from my reading of it, don’t seem anything alike.

WA LL ACE: No, and they weren’t.

Oppenheimer was an absolutely brilliant physicist. He knew a half dozen languages.

He learned Sanskrit, so he could read in the original language, a Hindu devotional poem, the Bhagavad Gita. The thing that was surprising—everybody knew he was brilliant, but nobody knew whether he could administer it all. And in fact, there was great doubt about that. In fact, he became a very good administrator and really ran the scientific laboratories at Los Alamos. He was the scientific director of the Manhattan Project and very good at it. Gen. Groves was a bulldozer of a man, big burly, and had that kind of a personality. His big project immediately before the Manhattan Project was he had been behind building the Pentagon, which was by far the biggest building in the world at that time, and he had gotten it through in short order, a lot through the aggressiveness of his power. He [said], “I know I’m intimidating, and I use that to my advantage.”

So now you get to the two of them. I would give more of the credit to Oppenheimer in terms of the blending of those two, because Groves was somewhat frustrated with the opinions and you could say the prima donna behavior of some of the scientists. A lot of the scientists bucked out at the kind of military order and deadlines that Groves was imposing on them. And the one who seemed somehow to make it work between the scientists on the one hand and Groves and the military on the other was Oppenheimer, to kind of keep everybody on board and keep the ship plowing ahead toward the research and then development of the atomic bomb.

CHEN: Initially, Truman’s trying to figure AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

17

“Stalin was interested. He just wasn’t surprised, because there was a Russian spy who had penetrated . . . the Manhattan Project.”

out how to tell Stalin that the U.S. has this bomb. Talk about how that goes over.

WALLACE: So July 16, Truman wakes up in Potsdam, Germany, and he’s there for a summit, the first post-Nazi surrender summit, to discuss postwar Europe with Churchill and with Stalin. We talked earlier right at the beginning about whether Truman was prepared for the job. This is the one time where he seemed nervous and not sure that he was up to it, because he knew he was filling Roosevelt shoes. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had, had developed quite a relationship. And in fact Churchill and Roosevelt had spent a hundred days together during the course of the war. [Truman] was going to be very much a junior partner, and he wasn’t quite sure he was up to it.

In fact he ordered up a whole tutorial, because he wasn’t that familiar with a lot of the subjects that potentially could come up in the summit. In any case, it turns out that very day, July 16, is the day that they test the bomb for the first time. There was great doubt as to whether it was going to work at all. Late that night, about 8, 9 o’clock, Truman gets word that the bomb has worked. Now he’s no longer the junior partner in this new, Big Three.

He’s the one who was got the most clout because he’s got control of the atom bomb. Churchill had been a partner with Roosevelt from the very beginning; in fact, he kind of urged in the early ’40s to begin the Manhattan Project. So he was along for all of that. But Stalin had never been told about it. And finally, the bomb has been dropped, it works, and Churchill and Truman are discussing well, do we tell Stalin or not? Supposedly the three of them are allies. So they decided they have to tell him, but Churchill says, don’t tell them too much, and wait till the meeting’s just about to break up. So finally, in late July, they agree today’s the day the Truman is going to tell Stalin. So at the end of a meeting, Truman comes over to Stalin—and he doesn’t even bring his own translator, he had just Stalin’s translator. Truman says, “I just want you to know that we have developed the most powerful weapon ever.” And Stalin turns to him and says, “Well, I hope you’ll put good use to it with athe Japanese.” And he

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leaves, and Truman is dumbfounded. You know, [Stalin hadn’t asked] a question, not “Tell me about it. How long have you been working on this?” Churchill, who was not in that group, but sort of sees what’s going on the three of them together and is I think also shocked that it was such a brief conversation comes over and says, “What happened?”

[Truman] says, “Well, I told him, and he said that and they left.” The answer is that that Stalin was interested; he just wasn’t surprised, because in fact that there was a Russian spy who had penetrated . . . the Manhattan project. He gave [the Soviets] a lot of the details about the bomb.

Stalin, knew all about it.

CHEN: Truman did wrestle with this question of whether to drop the bomb. Talk a little bit about the thought process that he went through.

WALLACE: Well, this is one of the most interesting parts of the book to me. I spent six years covering Ronald Reagan in the White House. I was the chief reporter for NBC. I’ve covered seven presidents over the course of my career. So I’ve always been fascinated by how they make their decisions.

There are three points about Truman’s decision-making process that really impressed me.

One was he was meticulous. He went over this material again and again; this was no snap decision. You have to understand until July 16, 21 days in, before the end of these 116 days, the bomb had not been tested as far as he was concerned it was a science project until they could prove to them, this actually works and can be used as a weapon.

So a lot of the early conversations as he sat down with Stimson and General of the Army George Marshall and all the other members of this war cabinet, was an invasion of Japan.

The estimate that they got was if you invade Japan—this is now the late spring and summer of ’45—the war will go on until November ’46, and we project it will be a million Japanese casualties and half a million

American casualties, because the Japanese were only fighting more fiercely and were absolutely refusing to surrender as we got closer and closer to the Japanese homeland.

So this wasn’t drop the bomb or do nothing. This was drop the bomb or invade. And as it turns out, I think it was true that an invasion of Japan would have been even bloodier.

[The second point] was that Truman sought out dissent. He doesn’t always follow it, but he wasn’t put off by it. In fact, after the bomb works, he has lunch in Potsdam with [Gen. Dwight] Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, and Eisenhower has been told just a few days before by Stimson about the existence of the bomb and at lunch, even though Truman, didn’t ask him, Eisenhower says, “I don’t think you should use the bomb because I think that Japan will surrender anyway.” I’m not sure I agree with that, but that’s what he says. “And I don’t think we should be the country to introduce this terrible technology to the world. I think it will hurt our moral standing.” Well, Truman, as I say, didn’t follow that advice, but he wasn’t put off by it. I very much credited that as well.

The third point I would make is that I think Truman’s reputation is that he is famously decisive. The buck stops here. “I make a decision on, and I never looked back.” In fact, he, he wrestled, I would say, even agonized over this decision, as I think he should have. In Potsdam, he was having terrible trouble sleeping at night. He complained of fierce headaches, which he had whenever he was under stress. You know, one of the joys of writing history as opposed to covering current events as a reporter is that I had access. One of the first things I did was went to the Truman library and spent some time there and got access to his diaries. He was a great letter writer to his mother and his sister and his wife Bess. But particularly in his diaries, where he didn’t have to be careful what he was writing, he described this bomb over and over as the most terrible weapon.

He described it in apocalyptic terms as the fire destruction prophesied in the Bible. So he wrestled with it. I think he agonized over it, and then he made a decision, but it was not an easy decision.

CHEN: So what do you think the rationale was? Certainly in the book, it’s very clearly

Hiroshima after the atomic bombing. Photo by U.S. Department of Defense

understood what he’s struggling with. They make the decision to drop the bomb in Hiroshima, but then they drop a second bomb in Nagasaki. Did you explore or think about the question of whether Truman questioned whether the second bomb was necessary?

WALLACE: There was not a separate order to do it. But it was interesting when Truman and Churchill talk about the bomb after the first test on July 16, Churchill says, “You know, we may need to deliver one or two violent shocks to Japan to get them to surrender.” You have to understand also there was one last part in [Truman’s] decision making. He wanted to give Japan one last way out before he dropped the first bomb and they delivered the Potsdam Declaration, which was the three countries of the Alliance

that were at war with Japan. Russia was not in that at this point; it’s Britain, the United States and China. In that, they made all kinds of threatening remarks. They obviously didn’t say anything about the bomb, but talked about the utter destruction of Japan, unless you give unconditional surrender.

The Japanese completely dismissed it.

They didn’t even give a formal rejection.

The Japanese government said we have to mokusatsu it, which meant to kill it with silence, basically ignore it. So they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and then Truman comes out and—he’s on a boat at that point, the USS Augusta in the middle of the Atlantic coming back from Germany—and he makes a newsreel statement from his state room, basically saying, “We will do this again and we’ll do this again.” And

there was silence from the Japanese for three days. It is on August 9 that they dropped the second bomb.

People say we didn’t have to drop the bomb because they would have surrendered anyway. We did drop the bomb, and they didn’t surrender. And then we dropped a second bomb, and they didn’t surrender again. The military government in Tokyo still wanted to keep fighting. It was only the Emperor Hirohito who goes over the Japanese government and decides to deliver a radio address. It was the first time almost any Japanese person had heard the voice of the emperor. He’s the one who unilaterally says “Enough, we have to surrender.” But if it hadn’t been for him, the Japanese would have fought on not after one, but after two nuclear explosions.

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SOUTHERN, BLACK AND RURAL—SELLERS

discusses his family’s experiences in communities that have dwindled, struggled and persevered over decades. From the June 9, 2020, Inforum online program “Bakari Sellers: A Vanishing Country.”

BAKARI SELLERS Former Member, South Carolina House of Representatives (2006–2014); Democratic Nominee, South Carolina Lt. Governor (2014); Author, My Vanishing Country: A Memoir Dr. MICHAEL MCAFEE, President and CEO, PolicyLink—Moderator

MICHAEL MCAFEE: I wanted to start really with a deep sense of gratitude for your voice—your voice around justice, your voice around reminding folks that race still matters.

As you say in the book, using empathy as a balm for suffering.

I wanted to start, after the thanks are out of the way, with just a simple question: How are you feeling?

BAKARI SELLERS: You can’t pull off your

BAKARI SELLERS

best Don Lemon impersonation and not let me give some thanks back. [Laughter.] So let me say thank you. Brother, it’s a privilege to be here with you. I wish that I was in San Francisco. I wish that I was traveling. I’m an extrovert, so thank you for checking on me—because extroverts doing this time from the South, you know, I shake hands, I hug.

Those things are so passé in 2020.

MCAFEE: That’s right.

SELLERS: And today is a weirdly emotional day. We get to have this conversation as George Floyd’s body is finally hitting the dirt and he’s being buried as we speak in Houston, Texas. Those people who are watching, just know and say a prayer for his family.

My mom and dad would always say that the two most important words in the English language are the words

“thank you,” because they’re not nearly said enough. So I have to say thank you to The Commonwealth Club, I have to say thank you to you, everyone watching.

You asked me how I’m doing. The answer is twofold. The first is, and I highlighted it in the book, last year, January 7, 5:28, Stokely was born, 5:33, Sadie was born. By about 10, 11 o’clock at night, [my wife] was passed out. She was feeling warm. She threw up, her

A VANISHING COUNTRY

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

21

eyes rolled in the back of her head. It was just me, her and a lactation specialist. We were trying to learn how to breastfeed twin babies. I never forget that night. No one was moving fast enough for me. The nurses were taking their time.

Finally, because we had a relationship [with] three Black women who where the OB/GYNs at my wife’s practice—I knew them. I called them up. I had them come to the hospital. They came as quickly as they can. One of the OB/GYNs had an eight-yearold child. She left her garage open and called her neighbor to come over and watch her daughter while her daughter was still asleep.

That’s the type of care that they provided, because I told them something wasn’t right with my wife. The nurses—although she had passed out and kind of come to—they just weren’t giving her the proper attention.

We found out she lost seven units of blood.

She was hemorrhaging. She spent the first 36 hours of our children’s life in ICU. [We] went through a lot with that moment.

And, you know, the overlay of politics: African-American women are four times more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts.

And then two months later, our little girl, Sadie, was still a little bit yellow. We couldn’t figure it out. We went to the pediatrician.

And our pediatrician called us back when it’s Saturday. You should know that if your pediatrician ever calls you on a Saturday, it’s not a good thing. Our pediatrician let us know that we needed to go to the hospital as quickly as possible. Sadie got diagnosed with biliary atresia. We had a Kasai procedure, which is a procedure where they try to connect your large intestine to your liver. That didn’t work. We ended up going to Duke University. She was on the liver transplant waiting list for 93 days. She got a transplant on September 1, and we’re so blessed and so fortunate. She got the gift of life. She’s thriving. She’s running around here. She loves the camera. I don’t know where she got that from. She got that from her daddy, but I’m not sure.

So you asked me how I’m doing and I can tell you that even though we’re in quarantine, and even though there is so much going on around us, my family is good, because we’re all healthy and we’re all together and we’re all happy. So we count it all as joy.

MCAFEE: Thank you for sharing that. I’m glad that you started there. I feel the same sense of privilege and gratitude and really just

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full of being blessed that I get to work and do what I love. The employees of PolicyLink are able to continue to work through this time.

But you said something in your book that was really important, because it speaks to something that I’m holding. I wanted you to explain it a little bit more. You [said] being angry isn’t a sin. And I feel deeply angry right now, in some ways also guilty, because of how we’re taking care of, and angry because of what I see in the world, angry because I don’t have full confidence that leaders like us will translate that tension from the street, the demand in the street, into really the transformative action that folks have. So I’m trying to hold that and channeling in productive ways, but that anger is not a sin spoke to me in your book. So I would love for you to share more about that.

SELLERS: I wanted to name the book Anger Is Not a Sin. My publisher and everyone else, we were having these conversations about the pictures that were painted in the book and the story about country and being country, —country versus Southern, it’s a whole theme in the book. And not just that, but the country and the ideals that the country holds. But you know, I’ve always learned and it’s always been sizzling in my spirit—as the comedian Kountry Wayne says, it’s been sizzling in my spirit—that anger is not a sin and too many people treat it as such. The trick though is that you can’t allow anger to paralyze you, right? You have to allow anger to manifest itself in a productivity, which is very difficult to do. But it’s righteous. And those people who have that righteous anger who were in the streets protesting right now, I’m with them 110 percent.

The best example I can give [is] the Charleston massacre for me. I was in Charleston, and I was a block away from when that happened. I was with Hillary Clinton and some others. I knew Clementa Pinckney so well. [Pinckney was the senior pastor of Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he became one of nine victims in Dylann Roof ’s June 17, 2015, racially motivated massacre.—Ed.] He would have been perfect for this moment. You know, Clem let a straggly white boy that they’d never seen before into Bible study, and he sat him down right by him in Bible study. He didn’t sit him on the other side of the church. Didn’t lock them out. Like if a straggly white boy with a backpack walked in your door right now, what you going to do?

Exactly. It’s Bible study Wednesday, what did

they do? They let him in the church. Right?

They let them in. That’s what you do. That’s what you’re supposed to do. They had a full hour of worship and learning and experience.

Clem set him right by him, so that this new kid that they didn’t know—I mean, this sounds really weird, but they treated Dylann Roof like you would hope to treat Jesus when you meet him. Like a refugee, somebody you don’t know, somebody who’s just here to get the Word; they set him right by the preacher.

And when they prayed the benediction, he shot them. Clem was so strong. Clem made it all the way to the the hospital. Eight others were [also] killed.

[Dylann Roof ] stood over [Mother Emanuel AME parishioner] Polly Sheppard and told Polly that he was going to let her live. Polly’s old; Polly’s like 80 years old now.

[Roof] said, “I’m gonna let you live, but I want you to go out and tell the story” [of the shooting].

For everyone who’s watching [us today] or who will watch, please, whenever you’re in Charleston, let me know. I’ll take you to Mother Emanuel AME. When you get to “anger is not a sin,” I tell that story because there are a lot of people in that church who were further along in their Christian journey, further along in their religious journey, and they can forgive Dylann Roof. And I can’t; I’m not there personally. That story, it makes me angry. Seeing a knee on the back of George Floyd’s neck makes me angry.

I’ve stated this many times since the video of George Floyd came out: To be Black in this country is being in the perpetual state of grieving, because we went from anger to immense sadness back to anger, back to rage, back to clear-eyed for justice.

Today, it was a homegoing celebration, right?

For all the white folks who are watching this funeral today: Yes, we do have fourhour funerals. That is the way that we do it.

[Laughter.] Welcome to the Black church.

And the only thing you didn’t get, was a repast. Because usually after their funeral, you get to go into the little cafeteria in the church and you get your fried chicken . . . and you get your macaroni and cheese and your rice and gravy.

We go through these stages of grieving, and I’m angry. I really am. And your anger should be noted. The challenge should not be to not be angry. Don’t look at your anger as a sin, never; but challenge yourself to meet this moment. We’ve been in moments like this before, and we swung and missed. We

“TO BE BLACK IN THIS COUNTRY IS TO BE IN THE PERPETUAL STATE OF GRIEVING.” had a moment in 1955 when people saw the lynching of Emmett Till. We had a moment on the Edmund Pettus Bridge [in Alabama], when for the first time the 5:30 and 6:00 news was showing the images where people were getting beaten and bludgeoned. We had an opportunity after the president of the United States sang “Amazing Grace” at the funeral for Clementa Pinckney.

And we missed all of these moments. Let’s make this moment true.

MCAFEE: In order to make it true, how do you stop this thing that happens where we center white comfort over Black pain? I don’t know how we move forward. If everything has to be juxtaposed or whatever, whether I’m comfortable with it— SELLERS: You have to allow yourself to let go of some of this stuff, right? It’s not on Black folks to cure this world of racism.

Like it’s not on you. One of the things that I wrote this book [was because] I wanted to tell my truth. And just as every day you go to work, you try to speak truth to power, right?

Let’s back. Let me reframe the discussion here before we get to the end. I’d like to define what racism is so people understand it.

Stokely Carmichael defines racism as this. He says that if you want to lynch me, that’s your problem. But if you have the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. See racism is a power construct, right? It’s not somebody calling

you n----r. It’s these systems of oppression that people live on.

It’s the fact that Flint, [Michigan] and Denmark, South Carolina, where I’m from, still don’t have clean water. It’s the fact that children in this country are still punished because of the ZIP code that they’re born into. It’s the fact that the fastest growing small businesses in the United States of America are owned by Black women. Yet, many times over they are the ones who have limited access to capital and resources. It’s the fact that we have lack of access to quality care in our communities, especially in the rural South, where hospitals are closing, where many people live in food deserts—which y’all big-city folk probably take for granted, but where I’m from, it’s two to three miles to the nearest grocery store where you can get fresh vegetables. It’s more than that, right? So when you think about these systems of oppression, that is what we’re talking about.

This is larger than George Floyd. This is larger than Breonna [Taylor]. . . . This is the systemic racism and injustice that we’re talking about. It’s not on us to remedy this scourge of racism. One of the things I want to highlight though is that we have to begin to have very, very difficult conversations. Right now in this country, we have an empathy deficit and in order to make up that deficit of empathy, we have to begin to listen and

we have to begin to understand. Everybody’s not going to be a social justice advocate.

Everybody’s not going to have to make a statement. For example, I’m a huge Tiger Woods fan. His statement was weak sauce. I used to like the Knicks a little bit, but their statement—they could have kept it.

But sometimes you don’t have to make a statement. Sometimes you can read a book. When I wrote My Vanishing Country, I wrote it so that we could get some pride and hope. But then when people read it and wanted to know about the experience, what it meant to be Black in this country, the experience of the pain from the Orangeburg massacre where my father was shot, to the Charleston massacre, were able to get some understanding about the struggles they’re in.

MCAFEE: Thank you for sharing this. Are you comfortable talking about how that massacre has shaped you and some of the things that your father hadn’t yet— SELLERS: I’m literally an open book.

MCAFEE: I know how magical being in the South and West Point, Mississippi, was for me in the summertime. Share some of those fondest memories you have of just being a boy in Denmark, in that region, and then connect it to, What did you take from your parents that shaped who you are right now?

SELLERS: Growing up in Denmark, where you have three stoplights and a blinking light, AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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“THERE IS A LARGE PORTION OF THIS COUNTRY THAT DOES NOT GIVE PEOPLE OF COLOR THE BENEFIT OF THEIR HUMANITY.” where it’s a country city where everybody knows your name, you realize that you are very, very rich in experiences. You’re rich in who you are, you’re rich in understanding that you can be unapologetic in your Blackness. You don’t necessarily recognize the poverty around you. We didn’t realize that it was a really, really poor community.

I’ll give you an example. In the book we talk about the number one thing you can do as a person of color is be an example. We highlight that. One of the things that we used to do in Denmark, South Carolina—we had a recreation center that my father ran.

Every summer we would take the kids to Carowinds. How can I explain it? Carowinds is like a bootleg Six Flags. It’s our theme park that’s close by. It’s like McDowell’s in Coming to America. Do you remember that?

Anybody who doesn’t know that joke, if you watch Coming to America, McDowell’s is the knockoff from McDonald’s.

[Carowinds] is on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina. We would take kids every year after the Demark Recreation Center summer programs. Every year we get on a bus and we would go up to Carowinds.

It wasn’t the turkey legs; it wasn’t the big bags of popcorn; it wasn’t the big rides. People where I’m from, they wanted to stand on the

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border. They wanted to straddle the border between North Carolina and South Carolina and take pictures. The reason they wanted to do that is because they wanted to be able to tell people that they literally had left South Carolina, that they had seen something else.

They had been somewhere like that. They were no longer defined by 29042, which was our [ZIP code].

Just remember this one piece. Rededicate yourself to being intentional and purposeful in everything you do, especially when it comes to raising your children, especially when it comes to being advocates for justice.

My parents were very, very intentional and purposeful. I’m a product of the proverb “it takes a village to raise a child.” My village has Stokely Carmichael and Marion Barry, Julian Bond, Kathleen Cleaver, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer. That’s who we either knew directly, or my father was friends with who passed away before I was born. Because I had this village, the lens that I contextualize things through is from being a child of the movement. That’s how I look at things politically, culturally and socially—as a child of the movement. Their struggles—it helps me with the perseverance and [to] keep going.

MCAFEE: Barkari, when you would stand on that border as a little boy, where did you

project yourself? As you were standing on that border or talking about folks wanting to [be] somewhere, did you have a sense of where you wanted to be?

SELLERS: Yeah, I did. I firmly did.

MCAFEE: You talk about being an old soul, so I was curious about your purpose.

SELLERS: I did. And part of the reason was because my parents said, “If you want to be a doctor be”—okay, well, this is going to sound weird. But at that time, if you wanted to be a doctor, be Benjamin Carson. It doesn’t have the same ring that it once had. For those who are watching, who may not know that in Black churches, especially throughout the South, you had pictures of Jesus, Martin Luther King and Ben Carson, right? Those are the pitches you had in the repast hall.

Things have changed.

But they would say, if you want to be a doctor, be Ben Carson; if you want to be a lawyer, be Thurgood Marshall. If you want to be a politician—in my childhood room, I had pictures of Nelson Mandela. So I knew I was purposeful. My parents treated me with so many experiences that although we were sharing these experiences with other kids in my neighborhood, they were very, very honest about the fact that, even though I was Black in this world, I could be anything

I want it to be.

MCAFEE: You talked about growing up and not knowing you were in poverty. I didn’t feel that I did, for moments, but there was generally a lot of fun and especially in the summertime. But I’m trying to juxtapose that with a lot of folks who are white in rural America and who are feeling left out, how do you connect as a bridge, if at all right now, to some of this anxiety of what people would call flyover country? People feeling disconnected from the opportunity centers in the nation. It seems like your story could be one, and how you show up could be a bridge to some of this tension where we see ourselves as other and not connected.

SELLERS: Now you’re in Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, rarefied air right here.

You’re asking really good questions.

So you’re asking something that we don’t really do a lot in the media. When you say working class, they mean white. When they say rural, they mean white. When I say urban though, that means me and you­­—this is an urban conversation, right?

One of the things I try to do in My Vanishing Country is debunk those and say that we have these rural working class folks.

Now, this book is a political book, but it’s not partisan at all. There’s nothing in this book Democrat versus Republican. I just feel that would muddle my voice. I felt like there were so many things that we could say without having to go down that path of divisiveness.

But I don’t believe economic anxiety is a true theme that’s pervasive in this country. I think economic anxiety is a myth. I think we have a lot of cultural anxiety that’s rooted in race. I think the fact that the browning of this country is petrifying a large group of people, that they feel as if they’re going to be replaced by immigrants. They feel as if they’re going to be replaced by others. I’m very cognizant of that, and I have to push back on that Where there can be a bridge built out, I think there should be. I really believe that there are some common bonds between socioeconomic levels in this country. And I think that if you’re poor in this country, you have not all but many of the same struggles.

MCAFEE: Well, you talked about the bridge and you use the word in the book— atonement. Do you think that’s essential to that bridge being able to be built? And what does that word mean for you? What does the work look like if it is a path to building the bridge?

SELLERS: I frame that in a sense that Black

people are always in a position where we have to forgive. We talked about that earlier, like [people asking] George Floyd’s family, “Do you forgive the officers?” I mean, there’d be certain members of the family force that forgives, etcetera, etcetera. But why are Black folk always in this position to forgive?

Today Al Sharpton said something that was really refreshing. He talked about the power of a name. I thought about that a lot.

I’m 35 years old. I have a beautiful family. I have a New York Times bestselling book about my story. And every time I sign that book, I sign the name of someone who owned my family. Like when I signed my name Bakari Sellers, the last name is not the name that my family [chose]. That is the name that was given to my family when we got off of ships from West Africa on the coast of South Carolina. That is how pervasive and profound that is. One of my pinnacles and highest moments that I will achieve in this world, having this level of success, even when I signed my name, I’m signing the name of someone who wants to own my family and [control it] through degradation, oppression, etcetera. So when you think about that type of position that you have, you recognize that what I write in My Vanishing Country is true, that we’ve made a lot of progress, but we still have so far to go.

MCAFEE: When you think about progress, you talked about when you were in office being frustrated with some of the elected leaders, who you felt maybe have lost their way a little bit in terms of serving.

SELLERS: Yeah. Do you go to church, Michael? We probably should have had this conversation offline.

MCAFEE: I don’t have a church home out here, no.

SELLERS: I don’t want your pastor calling me. You know, back when our fathers were toiling in the vineyard, the Black church was the epicenter for social justice and change.

And I just feel like right now it’s reclaiming that. weirdly enough. Al Sharpton today I think began what others wanted to do, which was reclaim the purpose of the Black church. I wanted to challenge institutions to be better than they were, because for a long period of time, the Black church became a place where you wanted to figure out if you were a mega church or how many branches you could have. It wasn’t focused on being the epicenter of sustenance to both heal you spiritually, emotionally, etcetera.

It wasn’t a place where you went to ensure

that it was the epicenter for community involvement, engagement, voter activity, etcetera. But right now it’s all hands on deck.

We don’t have a problem with challenging these institutions at all. In the book, I challenged this country. There are people who have a more conservative bent who will chastise me for having the audacity to challenge the United States of America.

I’m very firm in my stance that the blood of my family literally runs in the soil of this great country. My father was shot February 8, 1968, so that he could bowl, so that he could bring an end to the injustice that we saw through the Jim Crow South. I have just as much claim to this country as anyone else, which means that I can push to make it better.

MCAFEE: When I’m listening to you talk, I often think about you sharing your spiritual orientation, the power of what your family says, but if I make the leap, if I’m listening carefully, the way you love humanity is very evident. But I often hear people say that love is weak. So I would love to hear what you think about, Where does this nation go if you can’t figure out how to love Black people, and why is that so important while not saying it’s at the exclusion of others? Where does this nation go if they cannot figure out how to love Black folks?

SELLERS: Let me just start off by saying if love is weak, then call me the weakest S.O.B. on Earth. I’ll be that. I’m a very emotional being. I am someone who falls in love and I love hard. I fell in love with this country and everything it can be. But I’m also petrified, because there is a large portion of this country that does not give people of color the benefit of their humanity. People watching, ask yourself, Do you know anybody who can put their knee on the neck of somebody else for eight minutes and 46 seconds? You can’t even do that to a dog.

My daughter was protesting yesterday.

It was a proud moment. She was out there and she wanted to go back, so she and her girlfriends, they went and they wear their masks. They made their signs. They went out and we dropped them off. We picked them up.

But why does my daughter have to protest for Black Lives Matter? Why can’t she just be 15? Why does she have to be so cognizant and why does she have to work so hard and so diligent in proving to people her value?

So we have a long way to go. That’s the truth of the matter.

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AFTER THE COLD WAR,

the United States became a “hyperpower,” with the world’s strongest military force and leadership of a mighty alliance.

Several decades on, things have changed, and two former secretaries of defense warn that U.S. leaders have not tended to the country’s valuable soft power assets. From the June 23, 2020, online program “Former U.S. Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and James Mattis.”

ROBERT GATES, Former U.S. Secretary of Defense; Author, Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World In conversation with JAMES MATTIS, Ret. United States Marine General; Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates

THE MILITARY CASE FOR USING NONMILITARY POWER Former Defense Secretaries Robert Gates and James Mattis explain

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JAMES MATTIS: Secretary Gates is my former boss, predecessor in office, and an inspiring role model. He was likened in one recent review as the rare foot soldier who rises to high command.

Secretary Gates, in reading your book, one that I would be reassured were required reading for presidents and cabinet officers when they come into office, I was struck by you attributing a large part of America’s 25-year decline in status and prestige to the failure of post-Cold War presidents and Congresses to recognize. resource and effectively used what you call our arsenal of nonmilitary instruments of power. Can you explain this fundamental failure and the significance of the title that you chose for your book?

James Mattis

ROBERT GATES: First of all, thanks Jim, for participating in this, and thanks to The Commonwealth Club for inviting me.

The germ of the book really began with the question in my mind of how the United States had gone from a position of supreme power in 1993, probably unrivaled since the Roman empire in every dimension of power, to a country today beset by challenges everywhere. How did we get here?

So I began looking at all of the major foreign policy challenges we’d had since 1993 and thinking about what we had done and what we had not done that contributed to decline in our role in the world and our power in the world. What I came up with was a set of nonmilitary instruments of power that had played such an important role

in our success in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and had largely been neglected and withered after the end of the Cold War. At a time when we continued to fund our military, we basically dismantled all of the nonmilitary instruments of power, from diplomacy to economic leverage to strategic communications and more As I looked at the situations—at these challenges from Somalia and Haiti in 1993 and others right up to our relationship with Russia and China today, and North Korea— it occurred to me that we had failed in many respects to figure out how to compete with these powers outside of the military realm.

The reality is, of the 15 challenges that I write about, for all practical purposes I considered 13 to be failures, and that’s why in the title,

the word failures comes first. There are a couple of successes, and they’re important successes, and there are some lessons to be learned from those as well. We had a lot of problems during that 20-, 27-year period.

I would just conclude by saying, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan both began with very quick military victories. The problem that [I] identified, whether it was Iraq and Afghanistan or Somalia or Haiti or others, was that once we had achieved military victory, we then changed our mission. We then decided to move to trying to bring democracy and reform the governments of those countries. And that’s where we ran into failure.

MATTIS: Secretary Gates, I’d like to go more deeply into what you just mentioned, this symphony of power. Could you give a brief overview of the type of instruments you’re referring to and where they might be more applicable, perhaps, or most likely than using the military form of power?

And if they’re not played, why aren’t they played? But start, please, with what are the judgments? What do you look to bring on into the forefront here?

GATES: So the two primarily coercive instruments of power are obviously the military, but I would say also cyber. In my opinion, cyber has actually become the most effective weapon that a nation can have, because it can accomplish military, political and economic harm to one’s adversary. It’s difficult to identify who perpetrated a cyber attack. It takes time to figure out attribution, and the more damage that was done the more important it is to identify exactly where the ones and zeros came from. So cyber is a huge player now in a way that it has never been before. It can dismantle or disarm weapons.

It can redirect weapons. It can shut down infrastructure in countries. So it’s a very versatile weapon, and it doesn’t take the kind of enormous expenditure of money that a nuclear enterprise or even a chemical or biological threat would represent.

So I think cyber is a very important one.

We’ve been pretty good about developing it for our military purposes, but I think we have not taken advantage of it in an offensive way, AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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“There are a dozen or more of these instruments [of nonmilitary power]. The problem is we have neither resourced them nor have we figured out a coherent strategy.” with respect to either political or economic targets.

Another important instrument is clearly economic measures, and these can be both carrots and sticks. The truth is, we’ve developed the sticks part of the economic instrument pretty well. We levy sanctions on any country that looks at us cross-eyed, and it’s become actually very complicated for a lot of companies, because we’ve got so many sanctions against so many countries, figuring out how you can do business internationally and stay within U.S. law [has] become a fulltime enterprise for lawyers and accountants in these companies.

So we’ve got the sticks part of it down pretty well—embargoes, tariffs, sanctions and so on. Where we have fallen down and where we once had real capability is in how do we use economic assistance or [the] economy as an asset, as a carrot to encourage, to induce other countries to do what we would like for them to do, or to follow policies that we would like for them to follow, whether it’s loans at discounts, whether it’s economic concessions, trade concessions and so on.

We’re very good as I said at sanctions; we’re not so hot at figuring out how we might advantage someone in dealing with us. Now, President Clinton and President Bush both were pretty good with Africa when they arranged debt relief for a number of African countries back in the 1990s and the early 2000s. That really helped a lot of African countries, but that’s a rare example of us using economic measures as an instrument of power.

Strategic communications, or as we used to call it in the Cold War, propaganda­— how do we get our message around the world? The Chinese have developed this to an extraordinary degree. Several years ago, [former Chinese President] Hu Jintao, allocated $7 billion for the Chinese to build a strategic communications network

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around the world. We, on the other hand, in 1998, dismantled the United States Information Agency and tucked what we call “public diplomacy” into a corner of the State Department. Various elements of our government do strategic communications, but there’s no coherent strategy. Each kind of goes its own way. We also lack the capabilities and reach that the Chinese have.

There are a variety of other instruments, Jim, that [I’ll] just briefly mention. Things like intelligence and how we use it with other countries, science and technology, our higher education, our culture, use of nationalism— as we watch Russia and China interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, we have failed to use their own nationalistic feelings to help build their resistance to what the Chinese and the Russians and others are doing. Religion is an important instrument.

We haven’t thought about it in that way, but religion has played a big part in international affairs, particularly since the end of the Cold War. All you have to do is look at the role of religion in motivating terrorists to see that it has real power.

So there are a dozen or more of these instruments. The problem is we have neither resourced them, nor have we figured out a coherent strategy on how to bring them together, as I call it in the book, in a symphony where they play together and each strengthens the other and overall strengthens the hand of the United States in dealing with the rest of the world.

MATTIS: Why haven’t we enlisted these other instruments in the symphony of power?

If America has the power of intimidation, if we’re threatened, obviously in an imperfect world we need the military, we need the CIA, but why haven’t we summoned the instruments of inspiration that are so strong in America? What is the reluctance for us to use nonmilitary instruments?

GATES: It’s a tough question to answer.

I think part of it is that the Congress has been reluctant to fund these nonmilitary instruments, really going back to the end of the Cold War. It was Congress that disestablished USIA. It was Congress that wanted to disestablish the U.S. Agency for International Development. President Clinton stopped that, but still diminished USAID by bringing it under the State Department rather than as an independent agency.

The Congress has not funded the State Department properly. The State Department has been starved of resources, except for a couple of brief periods during the George W. Bush administration, when there was an increase in the number of foreign service officers. So there’s been a reluctance on the part of the Congress to fund these things.

Congress hates development assistance.

They’ve considered it a waste of time—if we’re going to spend money, why aren’t we spending it here at home rather than in other countries—and they don’t see how that can benefit the United States.

Finally, a big part of the reason is the reluctance of the Congress to fund it, and in all honesty, the reluctance for the most part on the part of all four administrations to push for such funding. The irony for me is that at a time when the Congress has become more and more resistant to the use of military force overseas in the aftermath or Iraq and Afghanistan, at the same time they’ve refused to fund or make more robust the nonmilitary instruments that could take the place of some of that military activity.

MATTIS: In that regard, you brought up the war on Iraq. You mentioned earlier the change of mission, or what we call oftentimes in the Department of Defense mission creep.

So we go into Iraq, and you write in the book that as happened so often after the Cold War, there was a lack of imagination in the White House and its State Department on how to access nongovernment civilian expertise in order to strengthen nonmilitary capabilities.

They seemingly had no appreciation, you go on to say, of the importance of the private sector, apart from contractors, as an instrument of power. It just begs the question, How can we leverage the private sector? Obviously we keep the government

Left to right: Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talk during a visit to Mexico City on March 23, 2010. They attended the Merida Initiative Plenary, which focuses on helping the Mexican government fight drug-trafficking cartels and other security threats. (Photo by Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison, U.S. Air Force.)

out of some market things. We don’t want a government-run economy; but how do we enlist the private sector in enhancing our ability to basically exercise power, to again go to the nonmilitary aspects—how do we do that?

GATES: The first thing is to recognize that it actually has something to contribute, and then you can figure out how to make it work.

One of the things that frustrated all of us in the Department of Defense, I think through all of the Iraq and Afghan war experience, was the relatively few number of civilian experts. Here we were engaged in nationbuilding, and yet we had, relatively speaking, very few civilian experts who were in-country and helping make that happen. One of the instruments that had some effectiveness in both Iraq and Afghanistan was something called the provincial reconstruction teams— PRTs. At the peak of our presence in Iraq, we had 170,000 troops in the country, and we had 360 civilians in all of those PRTs in the entire country of Iraq.

So one of the things that I proposed as secretary of defense that got no traction— particularly, one of the things that we really could provide help with was helping both the Afghans and the Iraqis in terms of improving

their farming techniques, improving how they took care of their herds, and that kind of thing. They’re both basically rural countries.

So I suggested to the State Department, “Why don’t you go to our country’s land grant universities?”—I’d been the president of Texas A&M, so I knew what these universities were doing around the world in terms of their faculties working in very inhospitable and insecure situations—“Why don’t you go to these universities and ask them to partner with us and augment what we’re trying to do in these countries?”

Many of the faculty members were already in those countries, so how could we help them and how could we help provide some funding and so on? We also have the advantage that the head of the Association of [Public &] Land Grant Universities was a man named Peter McPherson, who’d been the president of Michigan State University, but also the head of USAID under President Reagan. So here was a guy who knew what we needed to do and who could have galvanized these universities to really be a powerful partner for us. Nothing ever happened.

Similarly, I think that where we can use the private sector or where we can partner with the private sector is in figuring out how we

are going to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative, this trillion-dollar program of infrastructure, building ports and airports and highways and sports arenas, and so on, in most places around the world. You know, a lot of these things are white elephant projects.

They involve a lot of debt for the receiving country. The Chinese make these countries sign contracts with Chinese construction companies to do these things. They don’t pay much attention to doing things honestly or in ways that actually benefit the people of the countries that are receiving these.

We can’t compete with that; the Chinese through their state-owned enterprises and banks and so on can find the cash to fund these projects. We can’t do that. Our economy and our government just [are] not structured that way.

But what we have is a private sector that invests all over the world. How can the United States partner with private companies in the United States and incentivize them to invest in some of these developing countries and bring jobs, bring environmental concern, bring sustainability in a way that doesn’t saddle these countries with projects that end up being useless, or saddle the countries with huge amounts of debt? We don’t really AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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do much in the way of trying to incentivize companies to move down that path, and it’s a resource that I think we could make better use of.

And then finally, I would say we have all these enormous numbers of churches and charities and others that do projects around the world, whether it’s in terms of health, and alleviating or getting rid of diseases, the work of the Gates Foundation and a number of others. They often don’t want much to do with the government, but is there a way we can augment their activities and we work in partnership with them? How can we work together? And frankly, there just isn’t much done to try and move down that road.

So these are just three examples of where I think we just haven’t been very imaginative in terms of how we can leverage our great strengths and translate that into efforts to shape the international environment in a way that serves our national interests. We don’t need to be altogether altruistic in these efforts; after all, it’s the responsibility of the president and the government to advance American interests and protect interests around the world. But that means you have to shape the international environment, and these are the tools that you can use to shape the international environment.

MATTIS: We have tried, on many occasions, to shape the environment, as you point out, not very imaginatively and not, very frankly, successfully. We have tried to help multiple countries gain peace and stability. One of the successes, though, was the Columbia plan, and that one worked. Why did that one stand out? Why did that one work when it’s among such a number—over a dozen of what I think could objectively be called failures?

GATES: Yeah, Columbia was a success, and it was a success under multiple presidents.

So by the late 1990s, Columbia was on the verge of becoming a narco state, a criminal state. The leftist insurgency, the FARC, was on the verge of being able to take control of the country and the government. What made

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Right: Colombian President Álvaro Uribe meets with U.S. President Barack Obama. (Photo by the White House.) Below, Former Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates (left) and James Mattis during their Commonwealth Club program.

our effort in working with the Colombians successful in controlling and then defeating the FARC was, first of all, we had a very strong partner in Columbia. The president of Columbia, President [Álvaro] Uribe, was a very strong person. He was an honest person, and he was determined to defeat the FARC. So we started with a president who was committed to democratic principles and the rule of law and who was determined to lead this fight, at considerable risk to himself; he survived a number of assassination attempts.

The second thing that helped us was that there were already some basic institutions in Columbia—they were wea k, but they had been established, and we could help strengthen those institutions inside Columbia. They helped carry the fight. That included both the police and the military, but also the judicial system. Over the course of the Colombian partnership, the planned Colombia effort, the Justice Department trained some 40,000 judges in Columbia.

A third reason for success, I actually give credit to the Congress. The Congress limited the number of Americans who could be in Columbia at any given time to help the Colombian government. So when the plan started, they limited us to 400 military people and 400 contractors. That eventually rose to 800 military and 800 contractors. But that was it. So that meant that the Colombians

had to fight the fight themselves, and our role had be limited to supporting them, training them and helping them become better at carrying the fight to the FARC. We couldn’t take over this enterprise, because of the limits that the Congress put on us.

So we were there in support of the Colombian government. And I think that was another reason for success —that it was up to the Colombians to solve the problem.

We could help them, but we weren’t going to run the show and do it for them.

I think another factor was that this plan really had bipartisan support in Congress and was funded over a period of about 10 years or more by three successive presidents. So we had the time to make things work, and had the bipartisan support to get the funding.

So for about $10 billion, over a 10- to 12year period, we helped the Colombians put down the FARC and regain control of their own country.

MATTIS: We’ve got a question coming in [from the audience]. How should the U.S. reestablish itself, vis-a-vis our allies?

I always used to think that as much as

I would proud of my marines and sailors, soldiers, airman, coast guardsman, and I knew that we were a threat to authoritarians, any objective review would say the bigger threat was America’s network of allies. That scared [authoritarians] more than anything.

That was votes in the United Nations, that was nations willing to put troops in the field alongside us. How do we reestablish with our allies a degree of reliability as someone they can count on? Because this, when you talk about things being tarnished, it’s pretty clear that right now, a lot of allies or traditional allies, partners, they don’t have that same degree of confidence.

GATES: It’s kind of amusing, it seems like Winston Churchill has a quote for every single possible situation. But one of his lines was “The only thing worse than having allies is not having allies.”

This is one thing that disturbs me about our current foreign policy. Our allies are a unique American instrument of power, a unique American asset. Russia and China have no allies. They have clients, but they have no allies—people with shared values

and people who have a history of working together. No one pushed our allies harder than I did to increase their defense spending.

And we need to keep that pressure on. They aren’t doing as much as they should, but that doesn’t mean we walk away from them if they’re unsuccessful at doing that.

They are a critically important asset for the United States. Let me give you an example on the economic arena, just to take it out of the military. So we think that for the playing field to be leveled, the Chinese have to make some structural changes in the way they operate their economy, they work with foreign businesses and investors, and so on.

Just think how much more powerful our bargaining position would be if on our side of the table, right now, we had the Europeans and the Japanese and the Australians and the Indians, all of them saying together to the Chinese, “You must make these changes in the way you do business to level the playing field, or you will pay an economic price for it.”

The Chinese love dealing bilaterally with countries, because in most cases they can intimidate them. They hate a multilateral situation where they face 8 or 10 countries, all arguing with them about their policies.

I attended a defense ministers meeting in Asia, and we had eight countries telling the Chinese minister of defense how offensive their aggressive actions in the South China Sea were. This is a big asset for the United States. And, and I don’t understand the unwillingness in Washington right now to understand that and make use of it.

How do we fix it? I think actually a change in rhetoric, being willing to reach out and consult with our allies before we make decisions and presenting a strategic case, listening to them, maybe adjusting our position somewhat to take into account their concerns.

Just to take one example, there’s nothing sacrosanct about 25,000 or 35,000 troops in Germany. And maybe there’s a reason to move some of those troops to Poland or someplace else. But that’s a discussion that ought to flow from a discussion with our allies and a discussion of the strategy and what’s behind it, and not leave the impression with them that we’ve made the decision to take 9,500 troops out of Germany because

the president’s annoyed with Angela Merkel for not being willing to come to a G–7 meeting.

MATTIS: I still recall one of your colleagues, Condoleezza Rice, telling a bunch of young generals and admirals as she waved her finger at us—I didn’t realize it was 18 inches long when she wanted to make a point—and she said, “Remember, gentlemen, we will do things with our allies, not to our allies.”

I’ve got to ask you one question that came in. Forgive my smile as I ask you, Secretary Gates; this person wants to thank you for your leadership, your service. I think both of us can respond to that part by telling everyone listening: We don’t care if you’re male or female, Republican or Democrat.

We don’t care who you voted for. We’re not interested in who you went to bed with. You were worth every bit of the service that we gave. It was a privilege to serve.

But this person goes on to say, is there anything you missed about working in Washington, D.C.?

GATES: The one thing that I miss is the opportunity to interact with the young people in uniform. I was joking with you before we went on the air that I was probably the only person in Washington that went to Iraq and Afghanistan for rest and recreation.

Get out of the political battles of Washington and go out and on those frontlines, see those 20 and 21 year olds, 22 year olds, 25 year olds, men and women who are out there doing their part for the country with courage and honor. The desire to help them; it would reenergize me to go back and fight the political fights in Washington.

You know, I spent a long time in Washington and I kind of went through everything. I went through four confirmation processes. Not all of them were a lot of fun.

There’s nothing like walking out to pick up The Washington Post on your driveway in the morning and wondering what disaster is going to face you that day.

But I miss the interaction with the troops, and I would say with the colleagues that I had at senior levels. They’re really amazing men and women, and dedicated. And I do miss that interaction.

But believe me, that’s the only thing I miss about Washington, D.C. AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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WHAT MAKES A MARRIAGE LAST? The husband-and-wife team of Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue report

H

e wa s t he k ing of day time television, bringing new and frequently controversial topics into American living rooms with his daily talk program “The Phil Donahue Show.” She has a 60-year acting career that ranges from starring in “That Girl” in the 1960s to (most recently) Ocean’s 8. Their lives changed and became forever entangled when Marlo Thomas appeared on “The Phil Donahue Show” in 1977. Reportedly a matter of “love at first sight,” the couple got married in 1980.

CHERYL JENNINGS: This month Marlo and Phil will be celebrating 40 years of marriage.

First of all, you have survived writing a book together, your first project. What was that like for you?

PHIL DONAHUE: Well, you said “survive.” We didn’t expect the virus to be accompanying our effort as authors.

After all these years of marriage, I learned a lot about my wife during this period.

JENNINGS: Anything you care to share?

DONAHUE: I was impressed with how conscientious she was. I mean, she knew everything. Every interview that we were scheduled to have, she knew what time, she knew where it was coming from, and how much time we had and that I better show up.

MARLO THOMAS: The great thing about us, the reason we got along so well is we have completely different personalities, Phil is Mr. Cool, Mr. Laid Back. He did 29 years of television, 6,000 hours. I mean, he’s the master he walks in and whatever he thinks, he says. I, on the other hand, I’m making

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MARRIED FOR 40 YEARS,

Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue reveal what they learned about long-lasting marriages from talking with 40 couples. From the May 13, 2020, online program “Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue: What Makes a Marriage Last.”

MARLO THOMAS Actress; Co-Author, What Makes a Marriage Last: 40 Celebrated Couples Share with Us the Secrets to a Happy Life PHIL DONAHUE Former TV Host; Co-Author, What Makes a Marriage Last: 40 Celebrated Couples Share with Us the Secrets to a Happy Life In Conversation with Cheryl Jennings, Emmy Award-Winning Journalist notes, I’m figuring out questions. I’m doing all kinds of research to be sure that I get it right. He’s just cooler.

It’s great, because when we went to interview Elton John and David Furnish in Toronto, the assistant gave us the message that we’d only have a half hour.

I said, “Oh my God, a half hour.” All the interviews were like two hours. So I went into a complete panic mode and I started making rapid-fire questions, like 30 questions that could get one-minute answers. I was so panicked about it, because I wanted to have a rich interview. Phil, on the other hand, put his feet up and turned down the sports on television. I said to him, “Aren’t you going to help me with this?” He said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. They’re not going to stop us

“Everybody wants the same thing.

They want to be able to trust their partner. They want somebody who will love them, and they want to love somebody. They want somebody that has their back.”

—MARLO THOMAS

Image by Seth Dixon AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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Left: Johnny Carson (left) with Phil Donahue on “The Phil Donahue Show” in 1970. (Photo by Rollyn Puterbaugh.)

Right: Garry Marshall as a fashion photographer and Marlo Thomas as Ann-Marie from the television program “That Girl.” (Photo by ABC Television.)

after 30 minutes. Trust me.” Well, I still went ahead and made my notes. And we got up there and we were there for like two hours.

So he’s just got a cooler head about it and I am a “make it happen” kind of person. I think that’s why we got along so well doing the book, because if we were both either his way or my way, it probably wouldn’t work.

But because we’re so different, it worked very nicely.

DONAHUE: Yeah, it was. It was a very, very interesting adventure for me. And I learned a lot. I was impressed with, for example, during the virus, she wanted [to watch] movies and I wanted to see what Donald Trump was doing. To encourage me to watch a movie once in a while, she made popcorn.

Sounds like a small thing, but wow, that got me to sit down and watch the movie.

THOMAS: I lured him away from the news.

You have no idea how hard that is.

JENNINGS: I can imagine, he’s such a journalist.

THOMAS: Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I say to him, “It’s the same information, honey, every hour.” He watches like six shows in a row. It’s all the same information, but it’s got a different little tilt. I respect that. He’s a journalist and he loves the news. I’m a movie buff. I grew up in Hollywood. I watch the news for an hour. I’ve got it. I don’t need to keep watching it.

But anyway, to answer your question, we got along fine. We never did a project together before, because I think we thought

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we wouldn’t do it well, that we might butt heads because we’re both Type A personalities. Even though our personalities are different in many ways, we’re both used to running the show. So I wasn’t sure that that would work, but it didn’t get in the way at all.

JENNINGS: Why did you decide to do this particular project as your first project?

DONAHUE: As our marriage went on and on, the more we were married, the more fascinated we became with other marriages and the people who occupied them.

THOMAS: For a long time.

DONAHUE: What was it about them? You know, half of us get divorced. Half of us!

THOMAS: Also, this was about a year ago when we were celebrating our 39th wedding anniversary. We were talking about the fact that the world seems so negative. This is before the virus. Just negative. People aren’t getting along. We’re so polarized. Men and women are not in a good place right now. There’s all kinds of accusations, back and forth. [We thought,] We’ve got to do something positive; you’ve got to get love out there again. And we thought, what better way to do it?

Instead of focusing on our marriage, which a lot of people have asked us through the years, “What makes your marriage work?” You don’t really know; you can’t really say, “I don’t know what makes it work.” We like each other. We’re chemically attracted to each other. But I’m not really sure.

So we thought if we went and spoke to a lot of couples, somewhere in the middle of all of that would be enough nuggets that we’d be able to figure out what is it that makes a marriage last. I think we pulled that off with these 40 different couples, right?

DONAHUE: Yeah, we got a lot of nuggets, a lot of good nuggets.

JENNINGS: You feature 40 couples. That’s so many interviews all over the country.

That’s a huge challenge. You picked people from all walks of life—actors, athletes, news makers, writers, comedians, musicians, President Carter and First Lady Rosalynn.

How did you choose these particular people?

THOMAS: We wanted to pick people, as you say, from all walks of life. John McEnroe from sports, and Sting, LL Cool J, Elton John and all kinds of writers and comedians, Billy Crystal, Ray Romano, Bob Woodward, who won two Pulitzer prizes, he brought down the president with Watergate.

We wanted to get a whole different group of people so that we could see no matter who you are or what you do, no matter if you’re Black or white or brown, or if you’re gay or straight, if you’re young or old—we’ve got some young couples in there that have been married only maybe 16 years, like Melissa McCarthy, and Viola Davis, 17 years—that we wanted to see: Does it change on any level, what you do for a living or what your race is, what your religion [is]? We have Catholic Christians, we have Jews, we have Buddhists, we have Muslims. President

Carter is a Baptist.

What we discovered is that everybody wants the same thing. They want to be able to trust their partner. They want somebody who will love them, and they want to be able to love somebody. They want somebody that has their back.

DONAHUE: And how do they solve problems? Or when things get a little rocky as most relationships eventually do, how did they solve that?

THOMAS: Every marriage was thrown several challenges. There’s alcoholism and addiction with Jamie Lee Curtis, and Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon lost all their 30year savings to Bernie Madoff. Jesse Jackson, straight from his marriage and had a baby with another woman and his wife took him back. Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan, three years into their marriage were given the diagnosis that Michael had Parkinson’s, which would last their lifetime. I mean, these are tremendous challenges that a marriage and a family faces, and yet they stuck it out.

What I thought was interesting is that these marriages lasted because people did not run for the exit sign. They really didn’t.

Like Kyra Sedgwick said, when you enter a marriage, you have to feel that there was no plan B, there’s no escape route. If you have that feeling, you will get through each thing that comes your way. Because a lot of people expect the other person to make them happy.

And if that person doesn’t make them happy in three or four years, they go on to another person who they think might make them happy. But the truth is that what makes you happy is what you build together. What you build together brings you happiness.

DONAHUE: Who was it who said it might be easier to fix the relationship you’re

in than cut it off and enter into the whole complication of separation and divorce?

THOMAS: That was Elsa Walsh, who’s married to Bob Woodward. She said, “I don’t understand this desire for disruption. You know, you get married, and if things aren’t working out, instead of running away and then going through all of this—the energy it takes to separate and get a divorce—put that energy and that focus back into the marriage.” And that’s a very good thought.

You know, Judge Judy is married to another judge, Judge Jerry, and they weren’t getting along. They got a divorce after about 13 years, and they missed each other so much. She was upset with him because she didn’t feel he was taking care of her in the way that she wanted to be taken care of. And he said, “I don’t know how to take care of you any better than I’m doing.” So she said, “Well, I’m leaving.” So they got a divorce. After about a year they missed each other. They started dating, and they got married again. So I said to Judy, “Well, did he change and start taking care of you the way you want?” She said, “No, I accepted it. Now I learned a lot, and I grew up.” So that’s interesting. You’re not going to change each other.”

What was it that James Carville said that was so good?

DONAHUE: Carville said when you find yourself going around and around on a Mickey Mouse, unimportant issue, kick that can down the road. His marriage has a pile of cans.

THOM AS: Behind ever y successful marriage is a whole long chain of cans, because people pick at it, pick at it. So we started doing that as one of the things we learned from the book. Sometimes we’ll

Left: Thomas at an E.R.A. rally in 1978. (Photo by Florida Memory Project.) Right: Donahue visits Davenport, Iowa in 1981. (Photo by Alan Light.)

go around and run on some stupid issue that we just can’t resolve. The first time this happened since our book, Phil turned to me and said, “Oh, let’s just kick this can down the road.” And we did. And it was great. It was wonderful. We thank you, James. Thank you for that.

JENNINGS: You knew a lot of the people you interviewed, didn’t you? I’m wondering whether it was easier or more difficult to ask them those really intimate questions, because you asked some really intimate questions.

THOMAS: We didn’t really ask a lot of intimate questions. They came across as conversations. We made the decision that we would see each couple in-person. We didn’t do any phone calls. That was a big investment on our part. We had to fly all over the country. We even went to Toronto for Elton John and David Furnish. We went to L.A. and Boston and Texas and Georgia and Chicago and D.C. We went all over the country, and it was a double date. It was the two of us and another married couple. And they would always put out salami and cheese.

DONAHUE: We had a olives and crackers and— THOMAS: —and hummus, some people put out a bottle of wine, and we would just have a double date and just start talking.

We never started with a question, even though I had in the back of my mind some things I wanted to find out about, like how AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

35

do they fight and stuff like that. And Phil liked asking the question, “What were your parents’ marriages like?” which was interesting. But mostly it just came out.

So we didn’t ask Ali Wentworth about her sex life. She said you gotta have a lot of sex and you have to stay with it. But we would have never asked her how much sex do you have? But she offered it. And some people just offered something about their sex lives or how they dealt with money. It was really a conversation. And when we started out, Phil said, “I’m not talking about our marriage.”

And then of course, once we got started, we talked to them about it a lot.

DONA HU E: Yea h. A nd once t hat happened, now we’re really rolling. And when we entered the relationship, we thought we’d maybe do 20 minutes. Well, really— THOMAS: Two hours, two and a half hours.

DONAHUE: Yeah. We were there a long time. Finally, after almost three hours, I’d say, “I’m sorry, but we really have to leave.

And everybody [got into it]. It’s amazing, something happened when we started talking about our relationships. It started to roll from there.

THOMAS: It got to be fun meeting these people that we didn’t know and having these conversations, because when you go out with another couple, even somebody you know very well—like we know Arlene and Alan Alda very well. Alan and Arlene and Phil and I have known each other for years and years. We’ve never sat down at dinner talking about our marriage. The idea that you sit down with another couple for two hours and the topic is marriage—it’s really interesting, because you don’t do that ordinarily.

So this kept going back and forth with stories that were funny, that were sad.

We cried a couple of times. It was very interesting.

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Like with R ay Romano, who’s such a funny guy, and he was funny all through the interview. Then he started talking about [when] his wife Anna was diagnosed with breast cancer, and he got very emotional about that. It was interesting to see a woman’s breast cancer from her husband’s point of view. We usually hear from the woman, but it was interesting to hear him talk about it and how he protected her and how he got the whole family to step up to it.

DONAHUE: Alan Alda drove a cab. Of course this is before “M*A*S*H.” He would bring the dollars and the quarters and whatever it was home. Arlene would put it out on the kitchen table and she put it in envelopes.

THOMAS: She had little envelopes marked “rent,” “money,” “food,” “utilities.”

DONAHUE: And then, when he hit [success] on “M*A*S*H,” he flew home every week on the red-eye.

THOMAS: From L.A. back to New Jersey.

A lot of sacrifices like that in order for people to have their dream and make their dream come true. What I saw was interesting about Arlene Alda—for nine years, Alan never made a dime from acting, only from cabs and being a doorman, and she supplemented the income.

Billy Crystal’s wife, Janice, also years of him making $4,000 a year, and she had to go out and not only supplement the income, but leave her kids at home. While he would watch the kids during the day, she’d go work all day. Then when she came home, he’d go into New York and try to get a standup

job for the night that paid nothing, $12 or something.

But what I thought was fascinating is that these women did not say, as some wives might, “Why don’t you get a real job?” They never said that. They believed in them DONAHUE: And they were tag-team parents. They would hand off the job of raising the kids or being with them.

THOMAS: During the day. They actually said to them, “I believe in you. I know you’re going to make it someday. We’ll just struggle

Top left: Donahue and Thomas at the 41st Emmy Awards in 1989.

(Photo by Alan Light.) Center left: Phil Donahue introduces the North American premiere of the documentary Body of War at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007.

(Photo by jbach.) Center right: Thomas at a 2008 book signing. (Photo by Shannon.) Bottom: Journalist Cheryl Jennings (far left) interviews Donahue and Thomas for The Commonwealth Club.

’til you do.” I just thought that was great. We know people in other businesses that went into business because their wives or their husbands just didn’t feel they were going to make it. It was just taking too much away from the family. It’s a very interesting thing.

That’s why those marriages lasted. That’s what makes a marriage last—belief in each other, supporting each other’s dreams, which we have done in our lives.

JENNINGS: It’s so clear. You talked about Ali Wentworth. For people who don’t know

who she’s married to, can you share a little bit more of that story?

THOM AS: She’s married to George Stephanopoulos. I would have never fixed them up in a million years. She is just a wild woman. She’s so adorable. She’s so funny.

And so brave. And George is so buttoned up, you know, he’s like a Rhodes Scholar, which I think he is; but he’s so buttoned up and he’s a real statesman. I really trust him as a newsman. But I would never fix them up in a million years. But when we sat with them, you can see it right away. They’re very much in love. They’re very cute together.

He’s her anchor, no pun intended, she said, and she is his inspiration. He says she brings all the color into my life. As we were talking, she said, “One of the things that makes a marriage last is you have to have sex and have a lot of it.” She said, “I know, you get the flu and everything. Okay. But if you don’t have the flu, let’s just go for it.” So, I mean, I just adore her.

DONAHUE: And Lorrie Sullenberger, the wife of the pilot who landed in the Hudson river, said “He landed on water, He doesn’t walk on water.” So, you know, they all have their own— JENNINGS: Were there any embarrassing moments when you were doing these interviews, where people would say things and go, “Oh, I didn’t mean to say that.”

THOMAS: We didn’t have anybody who said, “Well, that’s off the record” or “Don’t repeat that.” I think two different couples said afterward, “Don’t use that part that I said about my daughter” or “Don’t use that part I said about my son.” That was the only thing they wanted to protect. And of course we didn’t [use such comments]. But as far as themselves, they never asked us not to print something that they said.

We were there as adventurers into the land of marriage. We wanted to get at that.

We weren’t interested in finding out their

dirty linen.

JENNINGS: One of the things that I loved in your book [was] when you were describing how you were trying to get these interviews and record them. And it was just the two of you, right?

THOMAS: We did everything. The end pages of the book [are] selfies of us and all the couples; we took the pictures. Of course, they gave us their wedding photos. And we did all the recording. Our first interview— tell them about that, with Jimmy Carter.

DONAHUE: [Laughs.] Well, the Carters.

They were rolling. They were doing very well.

When we opened up about our marriage, that triggered everybody with whom we were speaking to open up about theirs. And the Carters— THOMAS: The recorder didn’t work.

DONAHUE: Oh, God. First interview.

THOMAS: You know, I’m from television.

So when the red light is on, that means you’re recording, right? Well on this recorder, when the red light was flashing, you weren’t on yet.

Who the heck knew that? So thank God, I had my iPhone that I used as a backup; and Phil said, Oh, we don’t need that.

DONAHUE: Yeah. “What are you doing with all this?”

THOMAS: Well, thank God we had, ’cause we got in the car, I was all excited to play it back—and I didn’t have it. Oh my God, I started to cry. Jimmy Carter—you can’t go back and get it. It was our first interview.

I said to Phil, “Why would we have our first interview be a president of the United States?” Anyway, we had the phone, and thank God it was on the phone.

But what was interesting was when we got everything transcribed each time and we’d look at the transcription, we were excited.

We said, “Wow, every one of these interviews was really even better than we thought.”

DONAHUE: And all different.

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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ARLAN HAMILTON Finding and fueling the overlooked tech founders

MEGAN ROSE DICKEY: Tonight I’m chatting with Arlan Hamilton, founder and managing partner of venture capital firm Backstage Capital. Backstage Capital primarily invests in people of color and other underrepresented people in tech.

First I want to talk about some of the recent events of police brutality in this past week, as well as the role that tech can play in an upholding white supremacy, that maybe some people haven’t thought about or realized before. So what has the last week been like for you Arlan?

ARLAN HAMILTON: It’s been a lot of things. Right now as we speak, I have helicopters whizzing by and distracting

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me—police helicopters, because of protests right downstairs, which I’m very happy to support and proud of that are happening. It’s been a lot; I don’t think I’ve ever been reached out to by more people at once, including my wedding and the book coming out, which were two big days where it’s just been a lot of inbound and a lot of mostly positive and mostly good. But it’s a lot to have this point of point of view right now, because so many people are looking to me to speak on certain things or for an opinion about something— which I’m happy to give, as you probably probably know. [Laughter.]

The first thing that came to mind when you said that was just like an inundation

of thoughts from other people, of noise, physically physical noise just because of all the protests, and of emotion. I still consider myself one of the luckiest people in this, because of the augmented privilege that I have procured for myself, I am not forced to be in any situation that I don’t want to be in at this moment. And I’m painfully aware of that.

DICKEY: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned that there’s a lot of like a lot of inbound, and I’ve definitely seen you commenting on some things via Twitter. But I’m curious, like what what are people in the tech community kind of coming to you with? Are they asking for advice?

“I would say 80 percent of [investors] are reaching out to get some sort of online co-sign so they don’t have to do anything else.”

VENTURE CAPITALIST

Arlan Hamilton wants to do for other overlooked entrepreneurs what she did for herself: make them a success. From the June 2, 2020, Inforum online program “Arlan Hamilton: About Damn Time.” Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

ARLAN HAMILTON, Founder, Backstage Capital; Author, It’s About Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated into Your Greatest Advantage

MEGAN ROSE DICKEY, Senior Reporter, TechCrunch—Moderator

Image by Sarah Deragon

HAMILTON: Well, it’s all sorts of people in the tech community. It’s white people and all others; it’s investors, it’s founders, it’s a lot of journalists. It’s a lot of stuff. The white investors and founders, mostly women—let’s just say the white investors and founders— when they’re coming to me privately, most of it is, “Did I get this copy correct?” “Am I being insensitive by saying this?” “Am I doing this [correctly]?” And I kind of, I answer some of them depending on our relationship. And some of them, I tell them, “You didn’t get this message right. I’m not the one that needs to dictate what you say. You need to do more homework and all of that that we’re used to as black women.

It’s a lot of that. And then it’s a lot of other white people who are just heartbroken, paralyzed, don’t know what to do in this situation, and they don’t want to offend and they just really want to be helpful and it’s crushing them. This is crushing them in a way that I find very sincere. A lot of founders reaching out just to say “What next” And a lot of investors—I would say 80 percent of them—are reaching out to get some sort of online co-sign so they don’t have to do anything else. I have a nonprofit and I do a lot of philanthropic work, but I don’t do it for them. I’m at work right now. I don’t have time for that.

And then 20 percent or so, I kind of

know when I’m about to get based on their first sentence. The 20 percent that I find to be the most sincere and helpful is “I’m not going to get this right. I want do something.

How about we start with my pocketbook?

How about we start there, tell me where to put the money and then tell me what’s next?

Can we we talk?” It’s the people who think that I owe them something, owe them my time or owe them some sort of masterclass, and those are the ones that are not getting the responses most likely. So there’s also a lot of inundation. You know, if you reached out to me earnestly and I haven’t reached back out, it could also be that I just haven’t gotten to it, because I’ve gotten thousands of messages.

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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DICKEY: It’s interesting. I’m sure I get not even a quarter of as many messages as you do, but I just noticed a lot more people reaching out in general and it’s just kind of me thinking Black people have been killed by the police for years, for centuries. What is it about this this time that is really making people want to reach out and maybe want to get more active? I don’t know what it is, but it just feels a little different.

HAMILTON: I’ve I’ve thought about it. I kind of have a theory. It’s because most of us are stuck at either stuck at home or stuck somewhere for a long period of time. There is no delineation between “I am going to take the day off, cause I’m Black and I’m feeling trauma and I need to have a mental health day” or “Over the weekend. I protested and I’m coming back and letting you know” at your [work]place where 90 percent of the people here are white, it is, it’s like the world and the country has a front row seat to what Black people have to witness, take in and feel all the time. Before they were seeing some of it, but they were seeing it kind of protected by us, we were kind of blocking them from we’re shielding them from some of it. Now they’re seeing it, and they’re like, “He killed him! They killed him! Look what happened!”

And we’re like, “Yeah, that’s what we’ve been saying.” And they’re like, “This is hurting me. I don’t like this feeling.” And we’re like, “Yeah, that’s what we’ve been saying.” And I think they’re able to experience it in a different way. It’s now it’s like a VR headset that the country is forced to be in because of COVID, and there is just in their face and at the same time, because we’re here and we’re not going back to work. I mean, we’re at work, but we’re not going into someplace— [A loud boom can be heard offscreen near Hamilton’s home.] Okay, I told you this might happen. I’ll be right back, okay? [Hamilton walks away from her computer screen.]

DICKEY: Yeah, take your time. For those of you in the audience, Arlan told us ahead of this that there was an active protest around where she’s living. So she is just making sure that she’s safe and doesn’t need to go. So please just stay tuned and— HAMILTON: Man. Okay. I was able to hear you. What that was, I just saw a bunch of smoke and I’m on the 18th floor, so that’s what scared me. Um, but what that is is that there’s so many police helicopters, some of the protesters have been setting off fireworks and to make the helicopters get out of the way or whatever. They haven’t done it this

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“Now they’re seeing it, and they’re like ‘He killed him! Look what happened!’ And we’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s what we’ve been saying.’”

“There are some people who are doing a great job at this, even though there is no perfect way of doing it.”

close before. That was too close for comfort.

Like the conversation we’re having couldn’t be more real—but that’s what’s going on.

DICKEY: On this topic of all the civic unrest and the police violence, how have you really felt about the tech community’s response?

HAMILTON: It’s just a little hard, because you say the “tech community,” and that can mean so many things. To me, VCs [venture capital firms] are not necessarily part of the tech community. It’s just a separate thing to me.

The founders out there, I think are for the most part doing a good job. And then you have the allies and Black folks. . . .

I think there are some people who are doing a great job at this, even though there is no perfect way of doing it. And I think that there’s a disgusting silence from some people that just tells me everything I need to know. It’s funny, because a lot of the people who are being silent in an uncomfortable way were so vocal about [former New York City mayor Michael] Bloomberg specifically being a good candidate.

DICKEY: To get more specific, when I said “the tech community,” I had a couple of things in mind—VCs specifically as well as [companies] like Facebook and Twitter.

So maybe we can start with other VCs. What have you seen from them? Because I feel like I’ve heard some stuff around VCs saying “Okay, I’m going to spend like all of June, have a meeting with Black and brown founders.” And then that VC’s calendar just got booked immediately.

HAMILTON: Good. I mean, I saw [investor] Jason Lemkin did that. I know Jason; I have nothing against him and I’ll tell him to his face I’m not going to throw a parade for that. I’m not going to hand him a cookie.

Good—it’s better than nothing, and it’s absolutely better than ignoring us. You put your money where your mouth is. You treat us with respect. I love that. That’s fantastic.

But I’m not going to sit around and start applauding when that should be the status quo. We’ve been saying that for forever.

So yeah, you see that and that’s, that’s like table stakes to me. Like I would expect nothing less than that. And anything less than that worries me.

You do have a lot of people stepping up.

[Foundry Group venture capitalists] Brad Feld and Seth Levine got in touch with me very quickly.

Let me also say this: I want to make [clear] that I’m not some sort of godfather,

you know; it’s not like you need to have talked to me for me to think that you are okay with the Black community in tech.

Backstage’s doors are open to investors who want to be introduced to founders, whether we’ve invested in them or not to want, who want to be introduced to other investors of color and Black investors, whether we are associated with them or not. Whether we get the carrier, not. That’s why we’re doing this. I can only go by my experience and what I’ve heard and what people are willing to tell me.

But there are a great deal of people who are doing what I think is right. And then there are some who are just painfully silent or just . . . awkward. [Laughter.]

DICKEY: Well, I can relate to being an awkward, but HAMILTON: That’s why they wrote Awkward Black Girl for both of us.

DICKEY: Yeah. That’s true.

You mentioned that there are some investors doing good in these times. What does that look like right now? Like what would you say is like the best thing an investor could really do right now?

HAMILTON: An investor who is not black?

DICKEY: Yeah, yeah. An investor who’s not black.

HAMILTON: I chose my words very carefully in the Tech Crunch article that I was just quoted in today, because I want it to be sure that people understood I was not saying we’re going through a national crisis, therefore you need to like write checks to us to make us feel better and to make yourselves feel better. I said you need to invest in Black founders, not every Black founder. And you need to keep your thesis and you need to keep whatever your standards have been.

But that has always been some sort of barrier.

Like we will not lower our standards to let women in—as John Doerr said, we will not do this, that, and the other; you don’t have to lower your standards. In fact, some of these Black founders are going to be lowering their standards to have a conversation with you.

Okay? So the best thing that an investor can do is do their job, especially if you’re investing other people’s money.

If you are a venture capitalist, and yes, you may have 1, 2 percent in, but you’re investing other people’s money—maybe you have 50 percent in [and] other people’s money, it’s your job to look at these founders. You’ve been able to hide in the shadows and not do your job, because the boss hasn’t been walking around, ’cause your boss is in a

different [place]. It’s not set up that way.

But right now everybody’s watching. And there’s no tears for you. If you can’t find the pipeline, sure we’ll help you reach out. How many times did we have to say it and how many ways do we have to say it for you to understand we’re here? It’s not like we don’t exist. Could you have imagined that we don’t exist—is that what’s been happening? So when someone like Sequoia [Capital] that has billions and billions of dollars under management, and I’m sure they’ve invested in a Black founder—they would have to, I think with these odds, and they probably invested in a founder that I’ve invested in.

So I’m speaking for myself here when I say they’re like, “We will do better and we will strive to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” When I have reached out to them multiple times and offered my services in multiple ways and handed them the dossiers of multiple investors who are Black.

I know you were trying to get me to a positive place of “What can we do?” But I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m fed up.

I was fed up when I was started, but I had this idea that the more work that I did, the more light that I put on founders, the better it will get. And the numbers are staying the same. And it’s taken like a national tragedy to get people to tweet something. “I’ll talk to black founders. I’ll talk to you now. Send me your best.” No, you go find them! Don’t have me send you your basket. Find them!

DICKEY: I do want to want to bring up your tweet from the other day that was directed toward Silicon Valley investors. You said, “Haven’t Silicon Valley investors figured out that I have all the receipts and don’t care about decorum? You can’t jump out of the taxi at the end of the inclusion marathon and act like you’ve been running in it the whole time. I see you, bruvs.”

HAMILTON: Yeah. That’s actually a term of endearment for me. I was trying to get them at the end.

DICKEY: So back to the tweet. You mentioned that that was actually geared toward Sequoia.

HAMILTON: It was inspired by the Sequoia tweet that I saw from them. It was not only about them, but I commented with a tweet to Sequoia where they said something on the long lines of a very innocent tweet of like “We have to do our best to make sure that there is inclusivity in our portfolio” or something to that effect. I’m just looking at that like, “Wow, you literally just did the

“It’s not like we don’t exist. Could you have imagined that we don’t exist—is that what’s been happening?”

ARLAN HAMILTON

MEGAN ROSE DICKEY

“Black people have been killed by the police for years. What is it about this time that is really making people want to reach out and maybe want to get more active?”

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

41

“Something feels different about this.

It’s like we’re this close to burning it all down and starting over, and we don’t want to get there.”

“Venture capital is going to be disrupted.

This heyday for them—those days are gonna be over.”

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THE COMMO N WE AL TH

bare minimum. Didn’t you? You just did the bare minimum.” I don’t care that there may be one or two scouts who are black. I don’t care. This is not enough when you have billions and billions under management. It would have been fine if you hadn’t tried to get your brownie points, your cookies with your parade by tweeting about that or responding to someone.

So I just said, “Stop playing. And if that’s the case, respond to me.” How often, how many years have you been talking to Sequoia? I also said that [Sequoia Capital partner] Alfred Lin has seemed to be the only person who cares from Sequoia—man; I use my words purposefully. I said the only man, because yes, there are some junior people who are women who have reached out over the years, but it has to be at the top. The partners are the ones who make the decisions, the partners, the people who have the GPs [general partners] and the LPs [limited partners] make the real decisions.

But their LPs are our health companies and things like that. So it has to come down to the GPs for me.

DICKEY: Since you mentioned limited partners—question from the audience: How can I invest as an LP in Backstage Capital?

I’m assuming you aren’t seeking other investors, so who else is operating with a similar focus on underrepresented founders?

HAMILTON: The last two of our funds have been listed as general solicitation funds, which is rare for funds. That’s the reason I can answer this question in this forum, and it’s the reason that I can talk about it in press. You can reach out to me at arlan@ backstagecapital.com; in the subject, say “LP inquiry” or however you want to put it. And I’d be happy to take a look. It’s as simple as that. You can go to backstage capital.com and take a look at our portfolio and, and use the contact form there.

What was the other question?

DICKEY: Assuming you aren’t seeking other investors, who else is operating with a similar focus on underrepresented founders?

HAMILTON: I don’t think that’s what they are saying, but the, the answer is you can reach out to me and I’d be happy to take a look at what you have in mind.

DICKEY: I wanted to circle back. You were mentioning that other VCs are talking about wanting to now, in light of these events invest more in Black and brown founders. It all just feels familiar, I suppose. I wonder like how, how we can actually make sure that people

actually take real action and like lasting action, as opposed to just kind of saying, “Oh, well, in this moment when I’m stuck at [home]and don’t really have anything else going on, I’m gonna tweet about talking to more Black founders and I’m gonna maybe take a meeting.” But then like six months from now, it’s like, “Okay, where’s the check?”

And I guess that’s maybe a note for myself to follow up with all these people.

HA MILTON: Well, yeah. And as a journalist, you have a really great position, because you can ask those questions, you can hold them accountable.

Something feels different about this. It feels a lot the same and that’s why I’m fed up, but it also feels a little different, and it feels different because of what I talked about earlier that the whole thing feels different. It’s almost like we’re this close to burning it all down and starting over, and we don’t want to get there. So I think people are like, “Okay, we really should listen.”

When it comes to accountability, a lot of founders are finding the way on their own. I just had an entire class earlier today; I have a course, so I have live talks about it. All we talked about was bootstrapping in the way of a MailChimp or something.

MailChimp—$600 million a year, no venture capital. And many other examples of that. Venture capital is going to be disrupted in a way, no matter what. This sort of heyday for them where they have that $200 million to $2 billion fund and just eat off of the management fee and do whatever they want and have meetings at strip clubs and pretend this and this and that; pay somebody $30,000 a year to make their optics look good—whatever; those days are gonna be over. And it’s going to be people who are really walking the walk who are going to survive that.

I just feel like your LPs are watching, because they now have to be held accountable.

[Even before COVID] I’d already gotten started [seeing] where the LPs, the people who are representing LPs, reaching out and saying, “I guess we need to start looking your way, looking at funds like yours. What do we do?”

I’m like, “Okay, well, you are five years too late, but let’s go.” So there’s no way that LPs aren’t paying attention, right? Most of them are paying attention right now. So I think journalists can do a really great job of holding feet to the fire. I think LPs who are investing in other funds—like if you’re

investing in $100 million dollar fund or $250 million fund, you have so much power. Don’t let anybody tell you you don’t have power with your $500,000 commitment, because if you get together with other LPs and you say, “Look, I want to do this. I think you do have a great track record, but I don’t see this diversity.” It doesn’t make sense to me.

Can you have a mandate that says, I want my money put a certain place? You know a percentage? And it really doesn’t have to be all at once. either. It just needs to be market change. It needs to be noticeable.

If 0.2 percent of venture capital goes to Black women, [in] 2019 $130 billion deployed—not raised, but I believe deployed.

Of that $260 million or so went to all Black women in venture and that was the same amount of money that Bird, the e-scooter received in their last round of funding. You want to add insult to injury again? You want to keep this up, or do you want to see [Foregepoint Capital founder] Don Dixon go out and get another million dollars from the crowd, bypass you altogether, have whatever exits he’s going to have. Those are going to add up. I know it doesn’t sound like much right now. It’s gonna add up.

DICKEY: I would imagine that a lot of people tuned in right now are pretty familiar with, with your story of how you got into Silicon Valley, but in the event that they’re not— HAMILTON: Everybody else. [Laughter.]

Yes. Megan, what would you like me to talk about? Yes, it was the San Francisco airport.

Yes, it really was food stamps.

DICKEY: I guess I’m wondering, why tech?

You were in the music industry before, but what really attracted you to tech and what made you want to be part of an industry that you already knew was pretty problematic and that had major diversity and inclusion issues?

HAMILTON: I wasn’t coming into tech itself to disrupt anything, except for the dating market. Originally, I used to have a website called your Daily Lesbian Moment.

And for five or so years, I had 50,000 people who would come and read it every month.

And in that time I match-made for like dozens and dozens and dozens of couples and hundreds of friendships and all of that through comments and through eventually a series of specific matchmaking. We called it Juliet and Juliet. And when I was on the road in music, I just said, “Oh, the Silicon Valley thing, like what’s Ashton Kutcher always talking about, okay, let me look at

“It really doesn’t have to be all at once. It just needs to be market change.

It needs to be noticeable.”

that. What’s Ellen [Degeneres] always talking about? Okay, let me look at that.” It was originally, “I want to start Juliet and Juliet as a tech company that has one real genuine match made per day.” So it’s not about the quantity. It’s about very beautiful content and it’s one match made every day, so I can say I had 365 weddings or something like that.

And it was in the research for that [that led to my VC career]—because I have to research things, I probably could have been a journalist. I like to research and delve into things and we’ll ask questions and why, why, why? And it was in the research for that, where I said, “Okay, I better know about fundraising, because I’m about to go and ask people to put money into this on top of the work that I’m going to do. That’s when I came across Kathryn Finney’s Diane Project.

I came across two or three articles, and way, way down at the bottom it said we have a diversity problem.

My first band that I worked with was five people on the road with me, a Norwegian pop punk band that I spent months with at a time; my wife is white. I have no problem with white people at the surface. That’s not what that was. It was like, these statistics [on diversity] are out of control. Are you kidding me? What can I do? Because I felt I could hack my way into raising [financing] for myself. I knew I could, because I had done so much that was so wacky and off the side. I knew I could, to what end? Okay, I get my million dollars or whatever; I have this company; it’s working. Do I get to raise again? Now I’m going to be talking to people at a later stage, or they’re not going to be looking at me.

And on top of that, more important, where’s the competition going to be? I’m not going to see the people that I roll with.

I’m not going to see women. I’m not going to see people of color here, queer people here, because they’re not getting any kind of second look. It was almost like I was going to sign up for a sports team that I wasn’t excited to win the match. I couldn’t see myself reflected at all, getting too far.

The whole point of that is that I felt like that needed to be figured out before going in on my own. Wall Street or our public markets were going to be too late to make any difference in my opinion. I didn’t have any money of my own. So I said, Let me take this around and see if anybody gets this.

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2020

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INSIGHT

DR. GLORIA C. DUFFY, PRESIDENT AND CEO

Badge of Honor

W

hen I was a teenager, my mom showed me her grandfather’s Civil War service badge. Imprinted on it is his name, H. Reddinger, and the Union Army unit in which he served, Company B, 6th Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery.

In the 1860 presidential election, Abraham Lincoln and his anti-slavery platform were victorious in Pennsylvania. In Western Pennsylvania, where my mom’s family lived and farmed, the vote was decisively against extending slavery into new U.S. territories, the main slavery issue in the election.

After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in the Spring of 1861, President Lincoln called for volunteers for the Union Army, and my great-grandfather’s older brother John, age 22, signed up for the 105th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment. He was captured by the Confederates, and interned in Andersonville Prison, the terrible Georgia camp for Union soldiers.

The anti-slavery families in their community believed they each should have a son in the war, so in 1864, at age 18, my great-grandfather Henry volunteered to replace his brother. His regiment helped to defend Washington, D.C. from Confederate attack, especially guarding the rail lines coming through Virginia from the South.

My mother explained to me that her family had stood against slavery, and she let me know that it was important to uphold equity and racial justice. Inspired by my ancestors’ stand in the Civil War, I have found in the ensuing decades that the needs to advocate for civil rights and racial justice are everywhere around us.

My first opportunity came when I was 18 and planned to visit Southern Africa. As I began to inform myself about the region, I was shocked to learn about apartheid in South Africa, and the near-apartheid of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, the country in which I would mainly spend time.

A white-run British colony that declared independence in 1965 rather than yield to British demands for majority rule, Rhodesia was denied diplomatic recognition by every country in the world except South Africa. The UN sanctioned trade with Rhodesia, in an effort to economically isolate the country to change its racist policies.

As a freshman in college, I worked with an African studies professor and a psychologist on our faculty to design an independent study where I would interview white officials, African nationalists and others about the prospect for majority rule in Rhodesia. I was stunned by what I saw there in the spring of 1972, a society in which a quarter-million whites subjugated five and a half million Blacks, who had no right to vote. Segregation was widespread, spending on education for the Black majority was minuscule and Black Africans were prohibited from owning land throughout most of the country.

The economic sanctions were flagrantly violated by countries, includ-

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SEE MORE

Henry Reddinger’s Civil War service badge: https://drive.google.com/ file/d/1zN71s-kM0EdgmFEVNXS6yQKbc_urfiyF/view The Occidental newspaper articles about racial issues in Rhodesia: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12y7b_S7ozLv9BBrucl_kzjpMIPoC_IO_/view?usp=sharing “No More Than 48 Hours,” about Ray Taliaferro: https://medium.com/@gloriaduffy/nomore-than-48-hours-f143043924a2

Photo courtesy of Gloria Duffy

ing Japan, Germany and France, whose companies bought Rhodesia’s tobacco crops and supplied ample goods for the white minority.

I reported what I saw in a series of articles in my college newspaper. After portraying the racism and illogic of the white attitudes, I ended my articles noting that holding onto views such as these had led to violent overthrow of white governments elsewhere in Africa.

I observed that the white government’s resistance to change could bring the same result in Rhodesia.

Three years later, one of my main sources, pioneering Rhodesian Black barrister and African National Congress activist Edson Sithole, was abducted and presumably killed. A year after that, guerrilla warfare intensified between Black freedom fighters and the white government. In the end, more than 20,000 civilians, 1,200 government troops, and 10,000 guerrillas died, and the Rhodesian government resorted to chemical and biological weapons against the guerrillas.

Majority rule finally came in 1979, and the Republic of Zimbabwe was born in 1980. Much of this could have been prevented if the white Rhodesians had embraced racial justice in their society.

The formalized racism practiced in America until the Civil War, which continued until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and beyond, and in Southern Africa through the early 1990s, has technically ended.

But discrimination, racism and civil rights violations are all around us, every day.

I wrote last year about an African-American former member of the Club’s board, former KGO radio talk show host Ray Taliaferro, who suffered from dementia and went missing at age 79 on a winter-time trip to Kentucky. The white sheriff there dismissed concerns about him and did not quickly do a thorough search, and Ray was found dead after spending the night outdoors in the freezing weather. This seemed to me a case where a Black life didn’t sufficiently matter in today’s American South.

Whether near or far, dramatic or subtle, each of us has the opportunity and obligation every day to take stands for civil rights, racial justice and equity. That is what our ancestors fought for, and what is honorable and right.

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