Episode 864 - Lawrence O'Donnell
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fuck nicks what's happening my name is mark maron this is my podcast wtf how's it going lawrence o'donnell is on the show today lawrence uh you may know him from his nightly show on msnbc
Marc:Yeah, he's an author.
Marc:He's here to talk about a book.
Marc:He's a former Senate staffer.
Marc:He was a writer for the West Wing.
Marc:He was an actor in stuff like Big Love and Monk.
Marc:And he's got a book out, Playing With Fire, the 1968 election and the transformation of American politics.
Marc:He's going to be here in a minute.
Marc:I'm going to try to turn this ship around.
Marc:There's got to be some good things.
Marc:You know, I'm trying to be...
Marc:optimistic about the future, trying to be practical.
Marc:I swear to God, my life, right now I'm trying to box stuff up and get stuff together.
Marc:And I'm throwing out a lot of stuff.
Marc:And I really just don't give a fuck about it anymore.
Marc:I never thought that day would come to where I just, all these tchotchkes and bullshit things that have just been hanging around
Marc:you know, like I'm like a cat.
Marc:I'm no different than a cat really with everything that's in my rooms.
Marc:There's not, I don't have a lot of shit, but in the garage I have a lot of shit, but it's just what I'm comfortable with.
Marc:Like if I remove large swaths of the shit in here, I'll be awkward and uncomfortable.
Marc:And I, I wouldn't know where to, to, I wouldn't know where to sit.
Marc:I wouldn't know where to, to, to rest.
Marc:I I'm just like, I get comfortable with the shapes in my environment and
Marc:And now I'm moving the shapes.
Marc:I'm throwing stuff out.
Marc:I'm moving the shapes.
Marc:I'm emptying rooms.
Marc:It's fucking... It's weird, but I do not give a fuck.
Marc:And I think maybe that's a sign of growth.
Marc:Maybe it's just the fact that I'm older and I don't see any reason to carry this shit around anymore.
Marc:Sometimes you just want a blank slate.
Marc:You just want just a mattress on the floor.
Marc:That moment where...
Marc:You get everything out and it's just you and that lamp and that mattress on the floor.
Marc:And you're like, why didn't I do this from the very beginning?
Marc:Because you have a lifetime of garbage that you amass and collect.
Marc:And for some reason, you can't get rid of it.
Marc:There's days where I'm just sort of like, I want everything gone.
Marc:I don't want to feed these fucking cats anymore.
Marc:I don't want any of it.
Marc:And then there's days where I read the news and I'm like, I don't know.
Marc:I just talked to Ta-Nehisi Coates in here.
Marc:And we were talking about a James Baldwin quote that he had said gave him relief.
Marc:And I guess on some level it does.
Marc:But James Baldwin said, you should be aware that failure is a distinct possibility.
Marc:I don't know if we're going to turn a corner.
Marc:We might not turn a corner.
Marc:And then what does that look like?
Marc:Do we just adapt?
Marc:It's so, it's so like chest crushing.
Marc:All of it.
Marc:I don't know what to do some days.
Marc:Other than think about leaving.
Marc:But, you know, there's the macro and then there's the micro.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Like, there's still good moments, right?
Marc:We've got some good moments.
Marc:Don't we have good moments, folks?
Marc:A few good moments.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I don't know why I don't just tell you.
Marc:I'm moving.
Marc:I'm moving.
Marc:I'm moving out of this crumbling, small, Adobe two-bedroom cabin I live in.
Marc:I'm moving somewhere else.
Marc:And I should be excited.
Marc:I am excited.
Marc:I got a different house.
Marc:And it's very exciting, but I've been here a long time and I'm dug in here and I'm dug into this garage and I'm dug into everything that's in the garage and in my life and in my house.
Marc:But I haven't done any work on the house, really, other than a driveway for years.
Marc:It's falling down.
Marc:Then the idea is sort of like, well, what do I do?
Marc:I'm still going to work here.
Marc:I don't know what to do with the house just yet, but I am going to another house.
Marc:And I don't know why I haven't been telling you about it.
Marc:I just feel like, you know, there's so much else going on in the world.
Marc:What do I got to share?
Marc:Why should I share anything I'm excited about?
Marc:I was looking for a long time, kind of half thinking about doing it.
Marc:And then I just found a place.
Marc:I'm going to do it.
Marc:and it's a big thing i've only bought one house this was the only house i bought and i've worn it out i've worn this house out but uh i can't really start recording at the other place for a while so i'm going to be here in the garage for a while
Marc:And I'll let you know what happens.
Marc:But that's why I'm going through all my stuff.
Marc:There's a lot of heartbreak and a lot of weirdness in this house.
Marc:There's a lot of ghosts.
Marc:There's a lot of bits and pieces from several different relationships.
Marc:There's bits and pieces of several different big ideas about how I should live and who I'm living with.
Marc:There's bits and pieces of my life going all the way back to college in this garage.
Marc:And it's like, I don't know what to take.
Marc:I don't know what to leave, but I'm excited.
Marc:And maybe I don't feel like I deserve it or something.
Marc:Maybe all this work, I just got to the point where I'm like, you know, I'm not married.
Marc:I don't have children.
Marc:What am I doing?
Marc:What am I waiting for?
Marc:Isn't getting a new place one of the exciting things people do?
Marc:So I did that and now I'm overwhelmed, anxious, terrified and in chaos and
Marc:But I'm excited and it's a good thing.
Marc:And I don't know.
Marc:I would have just stayed here like a cat.
Marc:But then I started to think like, do I want to die in this house?
Marc:Is this where I want that to happen?
Marc:Am I just going to die along with this house?
Marc:Am I just going to watch myself crumble as this place crumbles?
Marc:As bolts fall out of window hinges, I just get used to it and wait for the drop on the floor and then stick it back in when I close the window.
Marc:As roofs leak, do I just start to watch myself hunch over, walk slower in this house?
Marc:Nope, I'm fucking moving.
Marc:It's a big deal.
Marc:So there.
Marc:It's out of the bag.
Marc:I'm happy about it.
Marc:I'm nervous about it.
Marc:I'm overwhelmed.
Marc:But I feel like I worked hard and I'm going to go and live in a nicer house.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:There I said it.
Marc:Why am I ashamed to say that?
Marc:It's so stupid.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:I got this other thing I wanted to share with you.
Marc:A nice story.
Marc:I like this story.
Marc:It's from an email, but I think it's touching.
Marc:My eight year old is in tears over Buster's return.
Marc:That's the subject line.
Marc:How am I not going to pop that open?
Marc:Hello, Mark.
Marc:I wanted to let you know that my husband and I are longtime fans.
Marc:We often listen in the car and our eight year old son was with me last week when he discussed Buster running away.
Marc:We have three rescue cats who are all brothers.
Marc:They're about 18 months old.
Marc:And when my son heard you say Buster was missing, he burst into tears and said we needed to find a way to help.
Marc:I later found him in his room making missing Buster kitten signs.
Marc:Mind you, we live in the suburbs of Chicago, and I told him this gesture was very kind, but I doubt Buster would make it this far from home.
Marc:This morning, while listening to you on the way to school for him and work for me, we heard Buster was back and he cried tears of joy for you and asked that I pass along the message that he is so happy for you to have him back.
Marc:Oh, boy.
Marc:I hope this message finds you well.
Marc:And please never forget that you have fans big and small all over.
Marc:All my best.
Marc:That's a sweet one.
Marc:Look, I'm glad he's back too.
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:So Lawrence O'Donnell.
Marc:The Lawrence O'Donnell.
Marc:Intense guy.
Marc:If you watch his show on MSNBC.
Marc:Means business.
Marc:He's got his sights focused on some... He's going for it.
Marc:He wants to take this fucker down.
Marc:That's no doubt.
Marc:But he's done a lot of other stuff.
Marc:He's lived an interesting life.
Marc:And he grew up in Boston.
Marc:And somehow he's he's managed to temper that a little bit.
Marc:But he comes from Boston.
Marc:So so I was excited to talk to him.
Marc:So this is me talking to Lawrence O'Donnell.
Marc:New book is Playing With Fire, the 1968 election and the transformation of American politics.
Marc:All right.
Marc:OK, here we go.
Yeah.
Marc:You have a life out here too, right?
Marc:Do you have a house and a car?
Marc:Yeah, I have a house and a car in Santa Monica.
Marc:You shoot the show in New York?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:All the time?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Isn't that getting tiring?
Marc:I do it here.
Marc:Oh, you can do it here.
Guest:I can do it here.
Guest:I'll do it here.
Guest:If I'm here for a weekend, I'll sometimes do it here on Monday.
Guest:Do you consider this your home?
Guest:I do, because I don't have another home.
Guest:I have hotel rooms, and so it's my home.
Marc:So, you know, I'm going to try not to just engage you on political matters, but I read some of the press for this, and I looked through this book, and I just talked to Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.
Marc:I watched all of the Vietnam War documentary.
Marc:And there's a back story in that that shows up here in your book because it's history.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And I found comfort in that it seemed like things were pretty bad then.
Marc:I know things are bad now, but when I watched that, because I was too young and too uninterested or apathetic to really wrap my brain around it, but the country was about to come apart.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And that's what this book is about, really.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Right?
Marc:It's about heading into that.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:so you you think it was worse then oh yes in almost incalculably worse and you remember it i lived it because you're a little older than me yeah i went to college i went to vietnam funerals right so you were in college in 70 yeah started in 70 yeah right yes yeah i know i was there in 72 because that's when i got my draft noticed
Guest:You did?
Marc:Oh, so you got one of the last ones.
Marc:I got one of the last ones.
Marc:One of those ones where it was just sort of like, go die.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:We don't even know what's going on there anymore.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Go die.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You got one of those draft notices.
Marc:I got one of those.
Marc:So what happened?
Guest:So I got the draft notice, and I had to go to South Boston to the- Southie.
Guest:So I got to go down there for my physical.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so these guys there, you know, who were like dressed as women and trying to get out of it, you know, and pretending to be mentally ill and all this stuff.
Guest:And by this time, you know, they'd seen everything.
Guest:And so you could not just walk in there in a dress and get out of the draft.
Guest:Not anymore.
Guest:Covered in peanut butter.
Guest:That would work in 67.
Guest:It isn't going to work now, you know.
Guest:And so, you know, I go through this whole thing.
Marc:Are you telling me you were dressed as a woman and you turned away?
Guest:No, I couldn't think of anything, so I went in dressed as me.
Guest:And I passed the physical.
Guest:And so then the process was you go home and you wait two weeks approximately.
Guest:Then you're going to get a letter that says, you know, be at South Station Saturday morning at 5 a.m.
Guest:for the bus to Fort Dix for basic training.
Marc:Oh, my God, just like that?
Guest:Just like that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So and I'm at home and, you know, and I'm trying to figure out what to do and how to deal with this.
Guest:And and the one thing I was sure of was I'm not going to go that I'm not going to do.
Guest:And so I'm going to.
Guest:You decide.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You have resolve around.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was I'm going to go.
Guest:I'm going to.
Guest:you know, end up in federal court like Muhammad Ali and go to prison.
Guest:I'm glad you had a precedent for you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or am I going to go to Canada?
Guest:Am I going to go to Sweden?
Guest:But I'm not going to South Station in two weeks.
Guest:And, you know, my father was a lawyer by then.
Guest:He was a cop and he went to law school.
Guest:And I was a lawyer by then.
Guest:And he had represented some of the very first...
Guest:mafia people who'd ever gone to trial in America.
Guest:In Boston?
Guest:In Boston.
Guest:The Irish mob or the Italians?
Guest:No, no, no, the Italians.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:So he knew people, like, if you go to Danbury, you will eat well.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And because, you know, Jerry and Julio will take care of you.
Guest:So it was like all this stuff was going on.
Guest:Food's an easy favor.
Guest:And then bang, like 10 days into this, Nixon ends the draft.
Guest:That day, over.
Guest:Done.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:And you were just sweating.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You're going to have to go meet with some mobsters.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But there's all these people, you know, who are alive today.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Those guys that I was over at the induction center with in South Boston, all of them lived and they all, you know, none of them joined the army because they wouldn't have been there getting drafted if they wanted to join the army.
Guest:Many of them went on to have grandchildren who don't know.
Marc:yeah that how lucky they are that that person lived yeah and and now they live yeah i in in after watching that vietnam doc knowing that at that point that there was everyone everyone knew that there was no point yes and that people were still dying and still being drafted for it was a lost cause well and and the worst thing of it all is the people who knew there was no point included
Guest:The presidents who did this.
Guest:All of them.
Guest:I mean, LBJ knew.
Guest:From the beginning.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Even Kennedy.
Guest:They were like, it's not.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Nixon and Kissinger, they knew.
Guest:And remember, the crime Nixon commits is to continue the war.
Guest:The crime he commits is to say, for me to get elected, there can't be any breakthrough for peace.
Guest:I won't win if LBJ has a breakthrough for peace.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Therefore, I want this war to extend.
Guest:So he goes behind LBJ's back.
Guest:right but yeah but when but to say i want the war to extend remember is to say i want thousands more american soldiers dead kids so that i can win the presidency yeah kids so okay so that in itself that level of of moral bankruptcy
Marc:You think you think that so far transcends Trump's level of moral bank?
Guest:Well, I think Trump has shown himself to be a person who would do exactly the same thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, in the same you give him that setting and it could be worse.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It absolutely could be worse.
Guest:And and so but what we saw was what we now know is a president was elected.
Guest:In 1968, in the middle of a war, thanks to collusion with a foreign power.
Guest:That's how he was elected.
Guest:The South Vietnamese.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the North.
Guest:He communicated to both.
Guest:But specifically, the best line of communication was to the South.
Guest:And LBJ didn't want to make hay about it.
Guest:for the sake of the country the good of the country yeah right yeah so wait now your dad was a cop when you were a kid he was a boston cop and uh what years though when did he you know in uh after the war so you know the late 40s early 50s he was a boston cop and so i was when i was born in the early 50s he was a boston cop and so no kidding yeah and he was what part of boston did you grow up in
Guest:I grew up in Dorchester, which is like way above where my father grew up.
Guest:My father grew up in Roxbury.
Guest:Actually, my father... West Roxbury?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:That's like the Conan O'Brien neighborhood.
Guest:That's like the classy... People went to college in West Roxbury.
Guest:Oh, I didn't know if it was bad then, though.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:West Roxbury.
Guest:But Roxbury is a whole other thing.
Guest:And so he grew up very poor because his father died when my father was about 11 years old.
Guest:And so...
Marc:Were they first generation, your grandparents?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:My father's father came over here when he was a year old.
Marc:So he was born in Ireland.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so my father had a really, really...
Guest:And ended up, luckily, becoming, for him, becoming a Boston cop because, you know, they never fired cops, so now you have a paycheck for the rest of your life, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he's a wise guy because, you know, that's what we are.
Guest:And so...
Guest:The O'Donnells are or the Irish?
Guest:Well, the Boston Irish.
Guest:Yeah, the Boston Irish.
Guest:It's a culture that's a clench fist.
Marc:I lived there for years and I was terrified.
Guest:I don't have to convince you.
Marc:I was terrified.
Guest:I was paranoid.
Guest:And so he's a wise guy and he's sitting there in the witness stand as a Boston police patrolman, right?
Guest:And he's getting cross-examined.
Guest:For what?
Guest:For anything.
Guest:For anything, right?
Guest:And he's getting cross-examined by these lawyers and he's sitting there thinking...
Guest:I could do that.
Guest:I could do that.
Guest:That guy, I could do that.
Guest:He's making more money.
Guest:He's barely a high school graduate.
Guest:He did terrible in high school.
Guest:He's sitting there thinking he's smarter than every lawyer in the courtroom.
Guest:And it turns out he is.
Guest:And so he's the first Boston cop ever.
Guest:who goes to college and law school nights.
Guest:And back then, he didn't even finish college.
Guest:He went to an unaccredited college, Suffolk University.
Guest:He went for two years.
Guest:That was enough for the unaccredited law school at Suffolk University to let him into the law school.
Guest:So he then gets through law school and becomes a lawyer.
Guest:So really, for my functional memory, my old man was a lawyer, which was a giant...
Guest:Giant difference in my neighborhood where everybody else's father was a cop.
Marc:But did he become like the neighborhood lawyer?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:He became a big time Boston criminal lawyer like that.
Guest:Like he's the guy you go to.
Guest:No shit.
Guest:He became the guy.
Guest:it was fascinating you know because he when i was a kid you could never get the slightest hint that anyone he was representing might have done it like that's out of the question you know and um and a disturbing number of them you know went to jail unjustly as far as i know right yeah yeah yeah and uh so yes and and there was a lot of um you know there's a lot of adventure and in the way he did it you know and and he uh
Guest:He went much more with gut than scholarship.
Guest:I mean, just amazing things that he pulled off that I watched him pull off.
Marc:But that was the period where Whitey Bulger was running everything, right?
Guest:No.
Guest:Okay, here's the illusion of Whitey Bulger.
Marc:But you grew up in Dorchester, right?
Guest:Yeah, Whitey Bulger was the next place over in South Boston.
Guest:South, right.
Guest:And, you know, my oldest brother's wife once had a date with Whitey Bulger.
Guest:They grew up in the same housing project.
Guest:I have three older brothers.
Guest:that's it yeah and a younger sister yeah okay and uh you did the catholic thing they did what they had to do yeah but my mother underpopulated she only had five kids each of her sisters had nine okay my cousins my mother was lazy about this what did you she had a job probably no she did she didn't most of the time she ended up uh working in my father's office and and bringing some sense to that and and some much needed calm i might say
Guest:Was he a chaos guy?
Guest:He was very chaotic, and he was filled with all kinds of rage that would come out almost every other day.
Guest:And I was about 12, I think, when I discovered that.
Guest:The source of that, which I wrote about in my first book, but he was 11 years old, and his father was a boxer, and his father killed himself.
Guest:And the kids, his twin brother and his older brother, saw this happen.
Guest:And it was one of those things where his older brother Patrick tried to take the gun away from his father.
Guest:Patrick was like 12.
Guest:And he chased the kids into the park and
Guest:Grabbed the gun away.
Guest:And so they they witnessed this.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I discover this when I'm 12 years old and I go, oh, now I get it.
Guest:Now I get why he's yelling about where are the gray socks?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like like.
Guest:Because his behavior in many instances was just mysterious.
Guest:Like, what is that rage about?
Guest:Because it isn't about the subject.
Marc:Well, that's sort of like where borderline personality disorder comes from.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That sense of abandonment.
Marc:Why wouldn't everybody kill themselves?
Marc:Right.
Guest:And, you know, he forever after that point for me became...
Guest:In many ways, whenever he entered the kind of, you know, the difficult behavioral zones.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was just this little boy.
Guest:He was this.
Guest:I was watching a lost little boy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Who was lost in the worst way and who was filled, by the way, with shame for life because he couldn't stop him.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:Because of the horror.
Guest:There's that.
Guest:The bigger part of it was the cultural shame.
Guest:Well, first of all, within the religion, that is a mortal sin.
Guest:His father could not be buried in the Catholic Church because he committed suicide.
Guest:So this is a kind of cultural shame.
Guest:It could never be admitted.
Guest:And when I realized that I was going to have to write about it and tell that story in my first book, my brothers were very worried about this because it had never been discussed before.
Guest:In the family.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And what sweeping grandpa's lie.
Guest:Never been dealt with.
Guest:And they said and they just kept, you know, my brother Michael saying the old man's going to go crazy.
Guest:He's going to go crazy.
Guest:He sees that in this book.
Guest:Oh, he's still around.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And so and so you're all terrified of him.
Guest:Well, I wasn't because I wasn't at that point.
Guest:I certainly was when I was 10.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:It was like, you know, like he would come home and you would just have to wait.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Is he on fire or no?
Guest:Okay, good.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Let's eat.
Guest:I know that.
Guest:But my father was the first one to read that book and he read it in a night and he kind of woke me up in the middle of the night and just said he loved it.
Guest:And he completely understood since he's a big character in the book.
Guest:Why?
Guest:That had to be explained to understand him because he always did.
Guest:He know it.
Guest:Was it something surprising for him that you put it?
Guest:Yes, it was surprising to him that it was in there.
Guest:But I think in the flow of the book, it probably wasn't surprising when that paragraph started coming up because I was explaining him and I was explaining motivations and I was explaining choices he made.
Guest:And I think and he's such he was such a smart he was very, you know, he was essentially, you know, unschooled, but he had a great head for writing and for literature and for.
Guest:And so I think he understood the flow of a story.
Guest:And I think he understood why this is happening on page 180.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:But do you think you made psychological and emotional connections that he hadn't made?
Marc:So him reading your book was sort of a revelation?
Guest:I think it must have been.
Guest:It must have been.
Guest:It's a tough line to tell.
Guest:One thing you're discovering is, oh, this kid of mine who's now, I don't know, 30 or something...
Guest:uh these are his observations of me yeah you know and as i sit here i have no idea if if if my daughter at 30 were to write a book that included me yeah i don't have any idea what adjectives would be right or i mean i know what facts could be told yeah and what's what scenes don't exist because i've never done that you know but sure i don't
Guest:I don't know.
Marc:You don't know how, no matter how empathetic you are, you cannot know what her experience of you is.
Marc:You don't know what they isolate.
Marc:You don't know what the isolated camera is on.
Guest:What's the repeated thing?
Guest:That one thing.
Guest:And look, I found out one fact about my father's history and I used it to explain a lot, almost everything.
Guest:I don't know if my daughter has a fact or a set of facts or something about me that she then uses to explain stuff.
Marc:The big nightmare was she just, she'll just disagree with you politically.
Guest:My father, the commie.
Guest:No, she's with me on that stuff.
Guest:Oh, good, good.
Guest:She's with me on that.
Guest:You got her there.
Guest:You made sure she learned the right way.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I am related to Trump voters.
Guest:You can't come from Boston and not be.
Marc:You can't come from my part of Boston.
Marc:And as me, coming from narcissism, I emotionally understand some of it.
Marc:you know like and i think anybody who is has a big ego emotionally understands you know the relief of being a dick yes it doesn't last long and most of us have shame about it right but there is that moment where you're like fuck you right and you're like he deserved it right and then a year or so later a week later a day later yeah i'm sad was out of line you know not he's not never out of line this guy
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The difference, by the way, culturally about that in Boston is that here are the things I'd never heard in my entire.
Guest:I never heard any of these words till I got to college.
Guest:Please never heard that word.
Guest:Never heard the word.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:And I never heard the words.
Guest:I'm sorry ever.
Guest:We were just uncouth.
Guest:But.
Guest:no one was confused like that no one was confused whether you were grateful for this thing if you didn't say thank you yeah there was a basic kind of soul level communication but where those words seemed unnecessary how do you track that though like with the because like i'll tell you i and i've talked about it a bit before when i was going to college in
Marc:Boston, there was a period there where I was just a sensitive Jewish kid in the middle of just Irish townies everywhere.
Marc:I'm so sorry.
Marc:It's all right.
Marc:I grew to like them.
Marc:I go back now, and there's nothing more unique than the indigenous...
Marc:population of boston you know yeah you know it's true uh there's not nothing like it and for a while there was terrifying and now i kind of romanticize it but i you know i go to ireland and i don't have any of i i feel so comfortable in ireland i'm a jew and and i'm like this is the greatest place it's so green these people are so humbled by history and uh and and sort of sweet and uh melancholy but not nasty how do you how do you uh you know explain that the the the gap
Guest:I have pondered it my whole life.
Guest:By the way, when I was a kid, the mayor of Dublin was a Jew.
Guest:Benjamin Briscoe.
Guest:It is inconceivable that in my lifetime there would be a mayor of Boston who was a Jew.
Guest:That was unimaginable.
Guest:I think it could happen now because Boston's changed dramatically and that's wonderful.
Marc:But
Marc:did you think but it wasn't because like i didn't here's the weird thing and i didn't mean to interrupt you but someone asked me the other day uh i was on a podcast someone asked me about the you know more so the new york guys the guys the guys you associate with trump from new york these guys that are like hey what's up you know like the assholes like like in in there there's the boston version but like i don't did you find do you think they're fundamentally anti-semitic or just what happened
Guest:Oh, deeply.
Guest:But here's what's so interesting about it.
Guest:It was a purely theoretical thing because we had never met one.
Guest:We wouldn't know what direction to go to find one.
Guest:And so I think I was about... Let's go to Newton.
Guest:We didn't know where that was.
Guest:There was no direct subway line.
Guest:So, yes.
Guest:In my neighborhood, Jew was a verb.
Guest:And so the prejudice, though, I realized when I was in high school, was completely theoretical.
Guest:And I realized at the same time that Mo, the pharmacist on Adam Street, is Jewish.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No one knew that, you know, because he had some non-Jewish last name.
Guest:It never crossed anyone's mind.
Guest:Oh, Malley.
Guest:He changed it.
Guest:And Moe was beloved.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he let people, you know, take the prescriptions without paying and catch up with them and all this.
Guest:Moe was a phenomenally wonderful man.
Guest:And so everybody loved him.
Guest:And I know that if I could make an announcement, by the way, everybody, Moe was Jewish, they'd go...
Guest:Oh, and it would really, there'd be a pause because their antisemitism, which was universal as far as I could tell, was theoretical.
Marc:Right, but I find now that what we're finding is, and what I find that's scary about the remnants and the never-ending sort of legacy of any type of racism is that, yeah, you could have done that.
Marc:And they would have went, oh, but he's a good one.
Marc:He's the good one, yes.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yes, that's probably what they would have done.
Guest:And I was so lucky because my father was a wise guy who decided, I'm not going to be a cop, I'm going to be a lawyer.
Guest:Because what that meant was, at Suffolk Law School, he connected with a fellow student, Sam Cinnamon, who was Jewish.
Guest:And I had this wonderful Jewish man in my home when I was a little boy, you know, just kind of learning to speak English.
Guest:And also within my home, there was an absolute ban, and it never had to be said.
Guest:It was never said, but there was a ban on the racial slurs and all that labeling.
Guest:And I only realized there was a ban when...
Guest:When I was in someone else's house and his father was a Boston Cobb and we're sitting there in the kitchen and he's talking to, so the two parents are over there at the sink and they're talking.
Guest:And I hear him go, I hear him say this N word.
Guest:And I thought he had just said fuck.
Guest:I thought it was like, oh, you can't say.
Guest:I was like, I was stunned by it.
Guest:And it was that moment when I realized, oh, my house is exceptional.
Marc:Yeah, there's nothing worse than hearing that used casually.
Marc:It's just to be in a moment with somebody who feels comfortable enough or just dug in or that it's just what they say.
Marc:To hear that word used casually or any sort of racist word, there's that moment where you're like, what do I do now?
Guest:Well, now couple it with he's talking about someone he arrested.
Guest:So right away, that's where I first learned.
Guest:the disparate treatment that black people suffer at the hands of police.
Marc:But where does it turn for you?
Marc:Your old man wasn't a drinker?
Marc:No, my father never had a drink in his life.
Marc:And did you ever find out why?
Guest:I've always suspected that his father was probably a bad drunk.
Marc:Did you ever get any closure or any explanation of where your grandfather was at when he did that and why he did it?
Guest:No.
Guest:The only way my father would ever talk about his father was in the most...
Guest:heroic praise just what a heroic wonderful you know just just pure suspended to before he picked up that gun that is i don't believe it i don't believe it you know it's it's it's his rewriting of who his father who he wanted his father father the box i'll never know yeah his father the boxer i'll never know
Guest:I'll never know really.
Guest:I don't think I'm ever going to have some view of his father because my father was the access to that.
Marc:What about your uncles?
Marc:Don't you have uncles or aunts?
Guest:They're all gone and no one talked to them about it either.
Guest:My father's sister is still with us, but no one's ever talked to them about it.
Guest:You're the journalist.
Guest:I can't go to my father's sister and say, hey, let's talk about that day.
Guest:And by the way, she was an infant, so she wasn't a witness.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So what drives you to get involved with politics?
Marc:I mean, who were you where you started to realize this is a thing that you could do?
Guest:It was pure accident.
Guest:I had no interest in it.
Guest:I wasn't drawn to it in any way.
Marc:Were you protesting in the 60s?
Guest:Yeah, in high school, I was going to the anti-war demonstrations, you know, and in college, and I had this weird freshman year in college where I was on the baseball team.
Guest:At Harvard?
Guest:Yeah, because I was okay at baseball, and I'd be going down to practice, and it's like, I am missing the peace demonstration on the Boston Common today.
Guest:What am I doing?
Guest:What kind of childish...
Guest:shit is this yeah and and there was there's this wonderful throw line where henry david throw says something about you know when you become a man you put away the things of a child and i remember that line put away the things of a child right and i'm walking you know across i got a baseball glove in my hand and i'm going what am i doing you know it was so and that's the way it was you know and uh
Guest:But were you awake and aware as a freshman?
Guest:Totally.
Guest:You were.
Guest:In high school, I was.
Guest:In high school, I was aware.
Guest:See, that's it.
Guest:Everybody was.
Guest:You couldn't be a sophomore in high school in America and not be worried about this because in my case, my older brothers all had draft cards in their pocket.
Guest:No of them went.
Guest:My oldest brother joined because he was advised that if you get drafted, you have no control over it.
Guest:If you join in and he was a college graduate by the time he joined, you might be able to get a soft assignment, which he did and never left the United States.
Guest:So, you know, joining was part of the strategy of avoiding the war, like actually joining, trying to get a cushy assignment in Germany or something.
Marc:You know, that was part of it.
Marc:Isn't that interesting, though, that that what made everyone so aware, you know, aside from the media environment being much more intimate.
Marc:You know, in terms of much less expansive.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Is that there was this real risk that you were going to get called up to go get killed or go fight.
Guest:Either you were going to die or your boyfriend was going to die.
Guest:Your cousin, you know, all my brothers older than me.
Guest:And I never heard a word when they were in college age and I was still in high school.
Guest:I never heard one word about career planning or what are we going to do?
Guest:And not a single word from anybody who was that age in my neighborhood.
Guest:It was 100% about how do I avoid Vietnam?
Guest:And there were a tiny handful who just went.
Guest:They didn't want to, but they would join the Marines.
Guest:They just kind of obeyed the older rule.
Marc:But it seems to me that as the 60s went on and into the 70s, that even if some of them thought it was the right thing to do initially because they believed...
Marc:the government that that's that what really defines the political culture that we're still living in is that that broke down because of ellsberg because of you know information getting out that the belief in the government doing the right thing did just uh eroded i think the the belief in the government doing the right thing was gone by 1968 by the end of night oh really yeah by the end of 1968 so anybody and in this book
Marc:He still pulls it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Anybody who enlists at that point is enlisting because they think they have no choice or they're enlisting because they think it is the right thing to do, even if this is a mess.
Marc:So, OK, so you got your mitt in your hand, you got your glove and you activate.
Guest:So what do you study?
Guest:I end up, through a process of elimination, studying economics.
Guest:And I had a simple rule for myself, which was, I want to take... Because, you know, when I opened the college course book, there were thousands of courses there my first week freshman year.
Guest:And there were languages I did not know existed.
Guest:I saw the word Urdu in this book as a language for the very first time.
Guest:it must have been wow it's harvard your dad must have been kind of blown away was that a normal thing no that was a gigantic uh gigantic cultural achievement for us in my neighborhood harvard was the punchline of a joker right a friend of mine would would always say and this was true by the way uh my father works at harvard station yeah and he was the guy who was making change for the tokens and um and so it was it was like it was it was a really weird thing i have to say like when i got
Guest:And the admission there and I got this form of early admission that they had for the local kids, basically local kids only and Boston kids only and the kids from the rich prep schools.
Guest:And they would tell you really early, like around Thanksgiving, you know, you're in.
Guest:And so I actually applied to one college.
Guest:I never applied anywhere else.
Marc:Just Harvard?
Marc:Did you go to a prep school?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I had big problems in high school.
Guest:I ended up going to three high schools, got kicked out of one.
Guest:What was the problem?
Guest:Discipline.
Guest:It was wise guys go to high school.
Guest:I mean, in our first high school that I went to, all my brothers went to this high school and
Guest:In West Roxbury, kind of a higher class neighborhood, a Catholic high school.
Guest:And it was kind of new.
Guest:It was the new high school on the block.
Guest:And they were competing with Boston College High School, which was the prestigious Jesuit high school.
Guest:And this was run by the Irish Christian Brothers.
Guest:And the way they competed with Boston College High School was to sit the parents down, because it's brand new.
Guest:My brother Michael, I think, was in their first class.
Guest:Sit the parents down and say, in effect, in polite clerical language.
Guest:We will beat the fucking shit out of your kid more than any other teacher anywhere.
Guest:It was like, we will beat them better.
Guest:Where do I sign?
Guest:So the cops and the firefighters and all that, they're all signing.
Guest:So we're all there.
Guest:And these guys were famous for...
Guest:Like their torture tools and like these canes they would use to spank you.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And it was intense.
Guest:And they had literally an up staircase and a down staircase.
Guest:And so my brother and I were not particularly...
Guest:I mean, we didn't get in fights and stuff like some of the other guys.
Guest:But at the end of like halfway through like sophomore year, they wrote a letter in the middle of the summer, like August.
Guest:They just wrote a letter to about 25 of us and said, you know what?
Guest:Don't come back.
Guest:You know, we've thought about it.
Guest:We've had some time at the beach.
Guest:We can't stand the idea of you guys walking back in here.
Guest:And so we, in the middle of the summer, had to scramble, you know, and find another high school.
Guest:So you were smart ass, just disruptive or...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, just smart ass, actually.
Guest:Oh, I mean, like we would just skip school and go play pool.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, and I remember one time.
Guest:Were you getting shitty grades?
Guest:No, I was doing pretty good.
Guest:You know, I was doing reasonably well.
Guest:But here's the funny thing about that.
Guest:Expectation and guidance.
Guest:So I have, well, by the time I'm a freshman in high school, I've got three older brothers who've gone through the same school and the same freshman year.
Guest:They say the following to me.
Guest:You won't understand the math.
Guest:You won't understand the science.
Guest:You won't understand the Latin.
Guest:The English and the history, that's just reading.
Guest:You'll understand that.
Guest:i go okay so i and i'm telling you this is the big vote of confidence that's my expectation yeah so here's the strange thing i'm in the second week of latin class and i still understand everything yeah and i think this can't last right this this has to fall out this has to can't happen right and i'm in this third week of math class i understand it all yeah it's obviously not going to continue right but i understand it yeah so
Guest:It's like if I had just had one person somewhere in my life who said, you're going to do very well.
Guest:You know, like I wonder what would I have gotten even better grades?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:No one was giving you that.
Guest:Zero.
Guest:Zero, man.
Guest:Wasn't that?
Guest:No, he was a terrible student.
Guest:He just was hoping.
Guest:I mean, he just was like.
Guest:In which you can.
Guest:He didn't know.
Guest:He would have no idea how to help me with a math problem.
Guest:So it was just.
Guest:And, you know, there's a cultural thing there, too.
Guest:which was summarized for me flawlessly by Carol O'Connor on the Merv Griffin show when I was about 13.
Guest:All in the Family is the biggest show in the world, and Carol O'Connor has finished season one, and he went off to the Abbey Theater in Dublin for the hiatus.
Guest:Now he's back shooting season two.
Guest:He's the biggest TV star in the world.
Guest:He's sitting down with Merv Griffin, who's also Irish, these two Irish guys.
Guest:Merv says to Carol O'Connor,
Guest:Oh, when you went because Carol O'Connor had trained at the Abbey Theater in Dublin.
Guest:Oh, when you went back to the Abbey Theater, it must have been the return of the conquering hero.
Guest:It must have been so wonderful.
Guest:There's a little pause and a breath and Carol O'Connor says, oh, you know, the Irish would always prefer you come home a failure.
Guest:And I went, oh my God, it's my whole culture in a sentence.
Guest:It's the whole thing right there.
Guest:And so what my brothers were telling me is, don't feel bad when you flunk Latin and science.
Guest:You're not going to understand chemistry.
Marc:No one ever has.
Marc:Well, what do you make of that?
Marc:What is that?
Marc:Why the cultural...
Marc:impetus why is it that way if it's if it's a joke and i know that they're hardened people in the irish or you know they've had they've taken their share of shots and that they're they're like uh i just but what is it about it culturally that that would be it is it a catholic because because success was a new experiment this was new to them i mean just think about it in my own my own family i mean my father's comfort it's it's understandable yeah failure is understandable success is like what do we do with that
Guest:I am first-generation college graduate in my family.
Guest:My mother didn't go to college.
Guest:My father didn't graduate from college.
Guest:I'm first-generation.
Guest:My brother Michael, Kevin, Billy, they're the first ones.
Guest:And in my neighborhood, by the time we were graduating from high school, approximately...
Guest:a maximum of half of the kids were headed to college and maybe half of them were going to finish.
Guest:And so we didn't have two generations of experience with the full run of education.
Guest:There was no physician in our family history.
Guest:There was no lawyer.
Guest:There was nobody who made a living in a necktie.
Guest:And so it takes a while.
Guest:You don't immediately adopt the values and the framework of
Marc:the six the academically successful world just because okay now you kids get to go to high school but you don't think that it came down through you know years of you know the the politics of the British Empire and then you know just this sort of idea that it's ingrained in the culture that life isn't fair yes oh yes that's for sure and that you know you just accept it yeah and you know if you get lucky it's not gonna last
Guest:Well, and also the other thing that Carol O'Connor is saying there is they will know how to talk to me if I'm a failure.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:They won't know how to talk to me if I'm not.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They have every word to say to the failure.
Guest:They'll tell them jokes.
Guest:Have a drink.
Guest:Everything.
Guest:They have everything.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:They have no vocabulary for success.
Guest:It's comfortable.
Guest:Because they have no experience with it.
Guest:And the so-called successful person is suspect to them.
Marc:how did that happen do you have that in you like do you like do you do you have an insecure like is there anything inside of you that you you you are not comfortable with success oh no not at all um not a bit you can if you want if anyone wants to give me any more i will take whatever whatever you can give me are you always like that
Guest:Yeah, because this is an evolution.
Guest:I have no idea what I would be.
Guest:I really don't have the vaguest idea what I would be if my father had remained a Boston cop.
Guest:I don't have any idea what I would have thought the horizon was.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:That's interesting.
Guest:But I've got a lot of poison DNA in me and stuff and a lot of stuff from my neighborhood that I use personally.
Guest:now as an excuse for the way i am you know i i kind of yeah you got you got a lot of fuck you in you yeah and and and and sometimes when i watch i'm watching rachel it gets into you i'm like how fuck you is he gonna be tonight
Guest:Well, what you're watching is someone who's trying to suppress that 24 hours a day.
Guest:I mean, literally, in my neighborhood, if you stopped at a traffic light in 1967 and...
Guest:my people didn't know you, there was a very strong chance that there would be punching on your driver's window of your car, and they would punch their way through the window of your car, and you'd be sitting there so shocked that it would take you a while to realize I should drive away, because this is an inconceivable.
Guest:Yeah, because there's this drunk Irish 17-year-old who's going bang, and he doesn't care that his hand is getting all ripped up, right?
Guest:So I was watching that as a little kid,
Guest:And I never liked it.
Guest:I never liked it.
Guest:And everybody in my neighborhood was ranked on how tough you are.
Guest:And so literally, like, who's the toughest kid in the second grade?
Guest:Lawrence O'Donnell.
Guest:Who's the toughest kid in the third grade?
Guest:Billy O'Donnell.
Guest:And my brother Michael was the toughest kid in his grade, so we kind of inherited those titles.
Guest:By the time I'm in fourth grade...
Guest:And Tom Broderick comes in as a transfer from South Boston and he's bigger than me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm thinking fighting is overrated.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I shouldn't have to prove myself that way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I immediately, I started to see I could lose.
Guest:And as soon as I understood I could lose in fighting and I could lose teeth and stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I basically became a pacifist.
Guest:So like in my neighborhood, nobody there, nobody in my neighborhood thinks of me as the slightest tough guy in the world because I didn't get in a single fight after like fifth grade.
Marc:That might have been the beginning of politics.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like how do I win without getting hurt?
Marc:How do I charm?
Marc:How do I be a diplomat?
Guest:How do I do this?
Guest:No, I was always trying to transcend the things in my culture that I did not like.
Guest:And I saw a lot of stuff in my culture that I didn't like.
Guest:And I and I knew I'm going to have to work at this for yourself personally.
Guest:Yeah, for myself personally, philosophically and intellectually, it was really, really easy.
Guest:I was in high school and I read Dick Gregory's autobiography and Dick Gregory explains, you know, why he's a pacifist.
Guest:Bang, that day, I'm a pacifist forever.
Guest:And now I know why.
Guest:And Dick Gregory explains Gandhi to me on this page.
Guest:I get it 100%.
Guest:Dick Gregory explains a few pages down why he's a vegetarian.
Guest:I walk in and I tell my mother I'm a vegetarian.
Guest:I become a vegetarian for the next 25 years.
Guest:Really?
Guest:25 years?
Guest:So intellectually adopting a new framework that was not available within my neighborhood was the easiest possible part of it.
Guest:And a relief.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yes, and a relief.
Guest:And I saw, oh, that's the correct way to think.
Guest:And I'm not even slightly tempted to throw a punch.
Guest:I don't have any of that.
Guest:Luckily, that stuff got flushed out of me.
Guest:All that stuff about throwing punches and all that stuff.
Guest:And a lot of it had to do with...
Guest:That I just never drank.
Guest:I was literally never drunk ever, not once.
Guest:Still?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was a miscalculation because I wanted to, like everybody else.
Guest:Every kid my age was totally shit-faced Friday and Saturday night when they were 10 years old.
Guest:10 years old.
Guest:If by 12 you were not getting shit-faced on Friday and Saturday night, people were looking at you.
Guest:What's going on?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What's wrong with that kid?
Guest:So I tasted it and I hated it.
Guest:I drank the beer.
Guest:It was the most foul thing I'd ever tasted.
Guest:And I was a very cold logician.
Guest:I don't want something in my mouth that I don't like the taste of.
Guest:I'm not having anymore.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I didn't give a shit about peer pressure.
Guest:Sometimes you got to stick with it.
Guest:Yeah, that's what I'm told.
Guest:I didn't know that, but I didn't care because I wasn't going to stick with it.
Guest:Commitment.
Guest:And then I made the mistaken calculation that this could work.
Guest:This could really work with the girls because-
Guest:I'll be the one who's not puking.
Guest:My stock's going to soar because I won't be puking.
Guest:I'm the only one here who's not leaning against a lamppost puking.
Guest:And did it work out?
Guest:No, because it turns out they had to be drunk, too, and I wasn't going to get them drunk.
Guest:And they like to take care of the pukers.
Guest:Yeah, they're very motherly.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So, so after Kyle, did you, you wrote for the lampoon?
Guest:Yeah, I was on the lampoon.
Guest:That was just a lucky, a really lucky thing for me.
Guest:It was back in the day where merit was not what got you on.
Guest:It was really, I mean, it was merit or good guy.
Guest:I got on in the good guy category.
Guest:Like people just wanted me hanging around.
Guest:But you were a funny guy.
Yeah.
Guest:I was a funny guy to sit around and talk by the standards of the place, and possibly at least 50% of that was my accent.
Guest:And how'd you get rid of that accent?
Guest:I had to study and learn to speak American, and it was the hardest thing in the world.
Guest:It comes out sometimes.
Guest:I like when it comes out.
Guest:It's a show of intimacy.
Guest:The more intimate I get, the more it comes out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is unfortunate because it's the ugliest sound.
Guest:But no, I drove cross country between high school and college that summer.
Guest:And I get as far as New Jersey and I need gas.
Guest:And I have to talk to a gas station attendant because New Jersey, you can't pump your own gas and all that stuff.
Guest:I don't understand a word he's saying.
Guest:He doesn't understand a word I'm saying.
Guest:I'm like pointing.
Guest:It's like I'm in Yugoslavia pointing to a gas tank.
Guest:I get back in the car and I go, I got to learn this.
Guest:So I turn on like CBS News Radio and I just sit in the car driving as if I'm in the language lab listening to French or Spanish tapes.
Guest:And I just listen, and it's taken forever, but it's right there, and it cracks.
Guest:It'll crack on my show, too.
Guest:And I feel it cracking, and I try to swallow the word on the show.
Guest:And then I feel like, oh, everybody sees this.
Guest:And then, of course, it flies by, and no one quite catches what that was.
Guest:I turn it into a cough or something.
Guest:So is it a shame thing?
Guest:Are you ashamed of it?
Guest:Are you ashamed of the anger?
Guest:It's a weird thing.
Guest:I know how weird the sound is.
Guest:And it's also...
Guest:The label of that sound is stupid.
Guest:That is the label.
Guest:And Southerners have this feeling, too.
Guest:I know Southerners who, when they were kids, if they had the means, they would go to New York with their parents or something, and they would notice...
Guest:The hotel treated their father differently because he had this accent.
Guest:They treated him like he's dumb.
Guest:And the bad thing when I was in my 20s about the Boston accent is that people didn't know what it was.
Guest:So they knew the Brooklyn accent because that had been in the movies.
Guest:The Boston accent had not.
Guest:And so you just sounded stupid.
Guest:No one knew where that was from.
Guest:They didn't care.
Guest:You just plain sounded stupid.
Guest:And literally, though, to actually be understood, you actually have to learn these words in other parts of the country.
Guest:Or how to say the words properly.
Guest:yeah i mean you know like you can say i can say to you know to my brothers uh say car yeah and they say car and they think they've said exactly what you just said it's like because we couldn't hear it you know boston people couldn't hear the accent we didn't know we had an accent yeah it's funny so uh so what happens after harvard did you graduate with the honors and shit not nothing special i mean everybody does
Guest:Because you're at Harvard.
Guest:Well, no, at that time and still, like two-thirds of the class gets at least cum laude.
Guest:If you don't have cum laude, I had that thing.
Guest:That's the lowest one.
Marc:You got an undergraduate degree in economics?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And my principle was I wanted to take courses where someone had to teach me.
Guest:So, for example, you need a teacher for that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You can't just pick up economics books.
Guest:So I didn't take history courses because I thought I can just read the history myself.
Guest:I don't have to use my course time for that.
Guest:I didn't take literature courses because I thought I'll read all that when I finish college.
Guest:So I know no history and no literature.
Guest:I never did the homework.
Guest:I never read it.
Guest:You wrote a history book.
Guest:So these things happen.
Guest:But economics, I thought, it's just a way of understanding the world.
Guest:And I thought it was the most interesting way to understand the world.
Guest:And I never thought it would have anything to do with anything I would do occupationally in my life because I had absolutely no occupational ambition whatsoever, none.
Guest:I had no plan, nothing.
Guest:I was a parking attendant in Boston when I was a college student.
Guest:That's how I was making money.
Guest:Where?
Guest:Down in the combat zone, as they called it.
Guest:We were parking for the theater district?
Guest:Yeah, theater district.
Guest:The company had a bunch of lots, so there were lots down at the Boston Garden and all around town.
Marc:And that was an on-the-level business?
Yeah.
Guest:And so when I graduated, it was a cash business then, Mark, a completely cash business.
Guest:And so when I graduated, I was a parking attendant.
Guest:I went from graduation to the lot the next night.
Guest:Harvard-educated parking attendant.
Guest:I'm on the parking lot.
Guest:And it was my father, actually, who said to me, you know, I've got this amazing case, this new case.
Guest:You should write a book about it.
Guest:This was a very peculiar thing to say because there was no evidence that I wanted to write
Guest:At all.
Guest:Had you written?
Guest:No, I would avoid college classes if they said you have to write a paper.
Guest:I hated writing more than I could describe.
Guest:I don't like writing.
Guest:I hated it.
Guest:Hated it.
Guest:But he had this amazing case, this civil rights case of this guy who'd been killed by the Boston police.
Guest:And he took on the case for the widow.
Guest:And he had this amazing evidence that he had built.
Guest:And he was convinced that he was proving the cover up and that they planted a gun and all this stuff.
Guest:And it's a really dramatic story.
Guest:And so I went into his office and I stared at it and I read the police reports in about three hours and I went, oh my God, there's a book here.
Guest:And so that's the first book.
Guest:Deadly Force.
Guest:Deadly Force.
Guest:That's why he's so big in the book.
Guest:And it was the first book about police killing black Americans and the particular nature of the way that's done, the way that's covered up and everything we don't know about it, everything we need to know about it.
Guest:And it came, you know, in the middle of the 1980s in a country that outside the black community didn't care about this at all.
Guest:It was impossible to get anyone's attention to it.
Guest:You wrote that what year?
Guest:It came out in 1984.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that was the first time you ever wrote?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:When did you graduate college?
Marc:1976.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:So you were just really just hanging around?
Guest:Yeah, I was a bum.
Guest:No, there's sections of my resume that look like prison time because it's just these big blanks.
Guest:It's like, what was he doing?
Guest:He was on the sofa watching TV.
Guest:What do you think he was doing?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:thinking thinking no but the book took seven years to write it so because i for a couple of reasons including i didn't know how to write yeah and so i mean i literally wrote an entire version of it that the publisher rejected said this is awful did you write it on a deal did you pitch it yeah i got miraculously uh i got a nine thousand dollar advance uh
Guest:to write the book it's funny like that's in 1977 right you're telling me it's like for a first book the advance isn't much more than that now it was the biggest i'd never i didn't know there was money like that in the world you know and then you know we sold it the book came out we sold it to hollywood and suddenly in one day in century city they hand me a check for a hundred thousand dollars and like oh because you wrote the screenplay no that was just for the book rights you know just for the book rights right and then you know then there was the money for the script and all that stuff of that i like that could that might not have gone anywhere book rights could
Marc:But that's a lot for books.
Guest:So I really liked this business a lot better, real fast.
Guest:And the book was a bestseller?
Guest:No, it was a bestseller in Boston only.
Guest:It did okay.
Guest:It didn't make anything serious.
Marc:I didn't read it, but so the sort of story of your father is integrated throughout the story of this kid?
Guest:Yeah, because he's the lawyer.
Guest:You're following him as the guy who takes on this case and proves for the first time.
Guest:And this case goes to the United States Supreme Court and back.
Guest:He went to the Supreme Court?
Guest:On this case, yeah.
Marc:What was it that the Supreme Court had decided?
Guest:Well, there was all sorts of evidentiary firsts in this case and procedural firsts that judges just weren't accustomed to, you know, that you're...
Guest:You're accusing the police department of covering this up.
Guest:So what evidence is relevant to that was something they had to feel their way through.
Marc:Something had never been seen before but had been happening for years.
Guest:Yes, of course.
Guest:This was the stuff that was being discussed around kitchen tables in black communities and nowhere else in America.
Guest:And I wrote the first op-ed piece for the New York Times about this issue in 1979, I think it was.
Guest:79.
Guest:The New York Times had never covered this subject at that point.
Guest:It didn't exist as a subject.
Guest:There was no research on it.
Guest:I had to do my own social science on it.
Guest:That's so not long ago.
Guest:No, it's crazy.
Guest:It was... And the other people who knew about it were cops.
Guest:Okay, that's who knew about it, right?
Guest:And so... And here's... I'll tell you one story from that thing, which is an insight into the world is not...
Guest:As, you know, it doesn't have the dimensions you think it does all the time.
Guest:And there's something to be said for gut and experience.
Guest:So jury selection on that case.
Guest:I'm in the courtroom as like an assistant, you know, and my brother Michael is my father's co-counsel on the case by this time.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And there's a woman whose husband is a Revere police officer.
Guest:Revere.
Guest:Revere.
Guest:Next door to Boston.
Guest:And my father doesn't challenge her.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Let's her go.
Guest:And we are sure he's going to use one of his challengers for the wife of a cop.
Guest:You can't let the wife of a cop on this jury deciding whether these cops murdered a guy.
Guest:You can't do that.
Guest:And we think he's nuts.
Guest:And he lets it happen.
Guest:Bang, she's on the jury.
Guest:And then they break for a recess.
Guest:I jump up out of my seat in the audience.
Guest:My brother Michael goes right to him.
Guest:I go, what are you doing letting the wife of the cop, the wife of the revere cop and the jury...
Guest:My old man, like totally 100% confident as if this is absolute fact and there's no guesswork involved, he says.
Guest:Nobody hates Boston cops like Revere cops.
Guest:Nobody.
Guest:And nobody knows what cops are capable of better than their wives.
Guest:instantaneously michael and i both realize he's 100 right he's a genius yeah and this woman was with him 100 of the way as a juror she never had one minute of being on the cop side of that case you know yeah and there's there's nobody at harvard law school who can teach you that you know there's no that's a good story is that in the movie uh yeah i think it's in the movie it was it was a cbs tv movie back in the day of movie of the week
Guest:is that what it came that's it so you sold the book rights and then you got a script deal yeah so then i'm in this business and then show business and then in 1988 there is a writer's guilt strike that lasts six months and at that point you've just gotten in i'd just been in i'm just scrounging around just getting a rewrite deal you know all this stuff right i got a ray stark rewrite deal i'm gonna get fifteen thousand dollars this is so exciting
Guest:And so there's this strike that happens.
Guest:And Senator Moynihan, who I had ended up getting to know through his daughter, who was a friend of mine.
Guest:You dated his daughter?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:She knew friends of mine.
Guest:She went to Harvard a few years after me.
Guest:And so she knew people in New York and we didn't know each other.
Guest:And at some point we knew each other.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then at some point, she invited me to a thing, this dinner thing that her father was doing.
Guest:I went, yeah, sure, I'll go to that.
Guest:And, you know, Mrs. Moynihan's from Boston, from the Boston area.
Guest:She still has a Boston accent.
Guest:So we warmed to each other right away.
Guest:It comes back, right, when you talk to someone.
Guest:All the time.
Marc:I get it, and I'm never from there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so in 1988, exactly when the Writers Guild, 1987 is when the strike started.
Guest:Senator Moynihan asked me to come into his reelection campaign after he realized that my union was on strike.
Guest:And I think that was an act of charity.
Guest:It was like this kid needs a check or something.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because he's, you know, and I go, OK, you know, and he wouldn't be a scab.
Guest:And I want no one in Hollywood to know this because you work so hard to get defined as a writer here.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's so hard to do.
Guest:And my agent now sees me as a writer.
Guest:I don't want my agent to know I'm doing this.
Guest:They'll think I quit the business.
Guest:It's got to be a secret.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I keep it a secret as long as I can because I work for him in the 1988 campaign, which means I sit there and watch because I know nothing.
Guest:I know absolutely nothing.
Guest:And he wins with 68% of the vote.
Guest:It didn't matter whether I was there.
Marc:How long had he been there at that point?
Guest:This was his third term he was running for.
Guest:He was unstoppable.
Guest:Senator in New York.
Marc:That was a Hillary Clinton seat, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When he left, Hillary ran for his seat.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he would spend $3 million to get reelected to that seat, basically.
Guest:And he was a good guy.
Guest:He was a great guy.
Guest:And New Yorkers loved him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a former Harvard professor.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And so every day was like this private Harvard tutorial at the highest level.
Guest:He's just an extraordinary person.
Guest:Just an extraordinary.
Guest:You know how you see somebody on stage and then the backstage version isn't as big as the onstage version.
Guest:The backstage version of Pat Moynihan is way bigger than the onstage version because there's so much more that he knows and has to say.
Guest:What was your job?
Guest:I made up a title in the in the 88 campaign.
Guest:I didn't have one for a long time.
Guest:And I saw I read an article about the Dukakis campaign and I saw the title director of communications.
Guest:And I went because Mrs. Moynihan's the campaign manager.
Guest:I'm the other guy.
Guest:That's the whole campaign.
Guest:And I go, OK, I'm director of communications.
Guest:OK, so I didn't do anything.
Marc:You must have learned something, though, that that seems to.
Guest:I learned I mostly I learned about the state of New York traveling upstate all over the place.
Guest:But you didn't learn anything about politics?
Guest:And I learned a certain amount about politics, but not very much, not then.
Guest:But politics, what I didn't know was how much I knew about politics, because politics is, if you're going to get it generically, it is simply the anticipation of human beings.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And so that includes understanding that revere cops hate Boston cops and their wives know how bad cops can be and all that.
Guest:So the anticipation of human beings is a generic skill.
Guest:And I find that most people in politics don't have it.
Guest:It's the understanding for, you know, applied to a means to an end.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And, and, and so, so I, I knew more in my gut than I realized, you know, and, uh,
Guest:And I was developing more, but I relied entirely on the Moynihan Senate staff in Washington and to tell me, you know, something would happen.
Guest:And I go, what does this mean?
Guest:I don't know what this is.
Guest:They're talking about this Social Security thing.
Guest:What is that?
Guest:And Dan Crane and these other people working.
Guest:They'd just call me up and say, here's what you need to know.
Guest:This, this, this.
Marc:Oh, that's what happened to me with Brendan.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, when I went to Air America, I'm like, what is what's going on?
Marc:Right.
Marc:And they will break it down for you.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then you get it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because politics is different than government.
Guest:Totally different things.
Guest:They are unrelated skills.
Guest:There are very few people who are good at the politics of campaigning and the politics of governing.
Guest:That is the rarest possible combination.
Guest:Obama might be the only one I've seen.
Guest:That combines them both.
Guest:You know, Bob Dole was great at the politics of governing.
Guest:We saw what he was at the politics of campaigning for president.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, just to pick an example.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, yeah.
Guest:There's a lot of them.
Guest:Bill Bradley was great at the politics of governing, not so good at the politics of campaigning.
Guest:So that's why he was never president.
Marc:So you get this little tutorial and you're sort of in it.
Marc:But that's really the beginning.
Marc:It kind of brings together your two worlds of writing and politics.
Marc:But I never write a word for Pat Mornan because no one does.
Guest:Because he's a unique writer.
Marc:But you're still learning.
Marc:It's just because there's this weird thing because now you are a respected political pundit and we'll get to the West Wing.
Marc:But at that juncture, whatever you learned about the legal system and this stuff investigatively about your father and Boston and everything else, that's part of the education of politics.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it all starts to add.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, the other thing, though, about about the my entry into politics was I went in there as a writer.
Guest:At that point, I'm a writer.
Guest:And I'm saying to myself, yeah, I'll go on.
Guest:I'll go on to a campaign because I want to see if I find something to write about.
Guest:I have this very Plimptonian inclination, which is to do things that I'm invited to do that.
Guest:I do not know how to do.
Guest:So I didn't ask to work in a political campaign.
Guest:You know, Pat Moynihan and Liz Moynihan asked me to join their campaign.
Marc:Oh, that's right.
Marc:So that's like Plimptonian that he used to become a boxer, become a bullfighter.
Guest:George Plimpton would train with the Detroit Lions so that he could run one play in like an exhibition game.
Guest:And he would write a beautiful book about that whole experience.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Paper Lion.
Guest:It was wonderful.
Guest:And so my life is a set of chapters of Plimtonian exercises that I did not set out to do.
Guest:I did not ask to do, except for the writer part of my life, which at a certain point, it was my father's idea, and then I did it, and then at that point,
Guest:This is what I know how to do.
Guest:So I'm going forward as a writer.
Guest:And so, yes, I wanted to write for West Wing and I wanted to write in show business and I wanted to get script deals.
Guest:That's all stuff that I wanted to do and put myself out for.
Guest:And every other thing that I've done is an accident.
Guest:It's just an accident.
Guest:The working in the Senate.
Guest:I ended up working in the Senate for Senator Moynihan for like seven, eight years, something like that.
Guest:you did yeah yeah i didn't like the 88 campaign when it was over he said what do you want we're at lunch he said what do you want and i thought like well i'll have the omelet and he meant what job do you want you know and he he couldn't make me a federal judge because i'm not a lawyer right so it's like what job do you want yeah and he said well come into the come into the senate office and you can be we'll call you my senior advisor and uh wow you know this for the guy who needs no advice
Guest:And then the Senate job got increasingly important because he moved into these chairmanships and eventually became the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
Guest:And so I had to run the staff of the Senate Finance Committee, or had to run that committee, which is taxation, international trade, Medicare, Medicaid, health care, welfare.
Guest:So we had to do a big tax bill for
Guest:for clinton we had to do nafta had to pass through that committee the world trade agreement had to pass through that committee hillary's health care bill tried to get made it through that committee but did not make it through the senate uh welfare reform had to go through that committee so it was real governance and this was no longer plimpton because i literally am my hands are on the wheel i am flying this plane yeah i but the plimpton i never
Guest:It was always there.
Guest:I was always observing it while doing it, but it was intensely real when I was running Senate committees.
Guest:That's the real thing.
Guest:And you're in the Oval Office and you are making the deal on exactly what this tax rate is going to be.
Guest:And that's the real thing.
Marc:And that is the nuts and bolts.
Marc:And you described it with a certain excitement, but that is exactly where most Americans' eyes glaze over.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Oh, mine too.
Guest:If someone started talking like this to me before I worked in the Senate, I just would have got me out of here.
Guest:I can't believe it.
Guest:By the time I'm two years into working in the Senate, I am sitting on the Senate floor and I am hearing a speech about Social Security taxation.
Guest:and i'm on the verge of tears it's it's oh i can't it's amazing there's a weight to it there should be yeah you know when you're in that chamber yeah you should feel the the history of it yeah and i feel sorry for the people who are there now because you can't you can't feel it now it's it's become a it's an it's a nonsense place it's a house of nonsense
Guest:So, like, my job doesn't exist.
Guest:The title exists.
Guest:But the people who have the job that I had, they haven't passed a single bill through their committee.
Guest:They have done nothing.
Guest:And they don't do anything, and they never will.
Guest:So how did West Wing happen?
Guest:So when I left working in the Senate, basically kind of consolidated to L.A.
Guest:and was...
Guest:I was actually writing a book then that I failed.
Guest:I got a deal to write a version of my Senate memoirs, and I did such a bad job with it that the publisher canceled the book a couple of years in, and I was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Guest:and it was horrible yeah and msnbc came along and said hey would you like to talk on tv about politics for money and i said how much and i said yeah and then i said yes yeah and and so i had that like okay that's that now i'm fending off bankruptcy and then west wing started up in uh basically in the year 1999 um aaron
Guest:Aaron Sorkin got the pilot made and then the network ordered episodes.
Guest:But actually, you know, NBC rejected that pilot when it was first written.
Guest:They got the pilot, they read it, they rejected it.
Guest:Yeah, why?
Guest:Because there's no baby dying in the emergency room, no one pulls a gun, no one's facing the death penalty.
Guest:It's just governing.
Guest:There's no car chases, it's guys in neckties marginally disagreeing.
Guest:And then in the end, getting along.
Guest:And so it's like, there's no show here.
Guest:I understand completely why they rejected it.
Guest:And so I was sent that pilot script as soon as Aaron wrote it because my agent saw that and said, wow, if this thing goes to series, if they make this thing, they're going to need you.
Guest:And I didn't know Aaron or anyone involved, but he knew they're going to need me.
Guest:And so then a year later, NBC makes the pilot because John Wells, who was running ER...
Guest:Used his muscle because he was also an executive producer on West Wing.
Guest:He used his muscle to get NBC to make the pilot, which they did not want to do.
Guest:And then the same thing happened with episodes and they got episodes.
Guest:So the minute they order episodes, I get the call saying, you know, okay, Aaron would like to meet you because that's when they hire writers.
Guest:So the fascinating thing for me was I had read the script a year before it was shot.
Guest:They then send me a video cassette of the pilot that they've shot.
Guest:And as far as I can tell,
Guest:in a year to think about it Aaron has not changed one word of the West Wing pilot and I'm looking at this thing and the script was great and the thing I'm looking at is even greater because now there's Allison Janney and there's Martin Sheen and there's Richard Schiff and Brad Whitford and Tommy Schlamme has this camera flying through these corridors and bringing this thing to life in ways that my eye didn't see when I was reading the page and so I went in and
Guest:met aaron and i was you know i was the only member of the writers guild in la who'd ever worked in washington at the time you know and been in the oval office in an actual business meeting and so i was an easy hire i was there well what was your impression of him immediately oh i loved him he he's he was great and and in the first year our offices were kind of like right beside each other we're in this little bungalow where yeah
Guest:Aaron's there and I'm there.
Guest:What lot were you on?
Guest:Warner Brothers.
Guest:And I said at the time to a screenwriter friend of mine, I'm going to quit this MSNBC thing because I'm full time at the West Wing.
Guest:I'm a writer at the West Wing full time.
Guest:And this old screenwriter said to me, oh, no, no, don't do that.
Guest:If you quit the MSNBC thing, then you'll just be another schmuck writer.
Guest:When you walk in the door now, they all think you know something that I don't know.
Guest:And you do.
Guest:They're impressed with you being on MSNBC.
Guest:So we'd be in the middle of a writer's meeting, three-hour writer's meeting or something.
Guest:Warner Brothers and I would get a call about you know can I do hardball at you know yeah four o'clock I go yeah okay and so I would get up and it would look like I'm going to the men's room yeah and I'd come back and then you know Warner Brothers is here NBC is next door right you know where Johnny Carson's studio used to be in Jay's studio and right above that is where they shoot these MSNBC shots and
Guest:Easy.
Guest:It's like four minutes away.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I would disappear from the table for like 25 minutes, which is a long men's room thing, but it's not unheard of.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:How many writers are in there?
Guest:There's another, there's like, you know, eight or nine writers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I would come back a little orange, you know, with this makeup thing, you know, and resume where we were because it's easy for, in a drama room, it's easy to be stuck for 25 minutes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you come back in there right where they were when you left.
Guest:So you go, how about this?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Great idea.
Marc:Just a guy standing at a board.
Marc:Yes.
Right.
Marc:At the same place.
Marc:Right.
Marc:A bunch of guys kind of sitting around like.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, but you did both jobs for all those years.
Guest:Yeah, but the MSNBC thing was nothing.
Guest:It was literally like I had never gave it a thought.
Guest:West Wing was, you know, TV writing was my job.
Guest:That was my real life.
Guest:That was a full-time job.
Marc:And you did it for years.
Guest:Yeah, I did the first two years of West Wing.
Guest:And then I left and created my own show for NBC, which didn't last long.
Guest:The one with Josh Brolin?
Guest:I had Josh Brolin playing a senator, an appointed senator.
Guest:He's a good actor, that guy.
Guest:Oh, he's so great.
Guest:I love him so much.
Guest:Working with him was just a dream.
Guest:and how many you did one we did we did we got halfway through a season and that was it they pulled the plug they asked me you know come back they could see my show was sinking and they asked me to come back if if that if your show gets canceled would you please come back you know oh yeah yes i will because i will be desperate i will come back right and all this time you're still shooting the msnbc show every day no little guest shots and not every day it was whenever it wasn't a regular show yeah there's days when i'd say no
Guest:You were just on the payroll as a guy.
Guest:Can you be a guest on Hardball today?
Guest:No, I can't.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:You know, my deal was I can always say no.
Guest:I would go weeks at a time without being on at all.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because my deal was I can say no every time you call me.
Guest:And at some point you got married and had children during this?
Guest:And before, yeah, when I was working in the Senate.
Guest:Actually, my daughter was born in the year before I left the Senate.
Guest:Oh, married an actress?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Catherine Harold.
Guest:Where'd you meet her?
Guest:In New York, in the world of New York.
Guest:She's funny.
Guest:She's the greatest.
Guest:You guys get along?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's good.
Guest:She's fantastic.
Marc:Oh, good.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I loved her in, what was that, Modern Romance?
Marc:Was she in Modern Romance?
Guest:Mary Harvard in Modern Romance.
Guest:And what I love about that name is that's Albert Brooks trying to come up with a wasp's name.
Guest:In my life, I have never met anyone named Harvard.
Guest:I think they went extinct, that tribe.
Guest:But it's like, Albert, oh, Mary Harvard.
Marc:Wasn't she in one of the Gary Shandling shows?
Guest:Yeah, she played Gary's ex-wife in, I think it was season two.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Of Larry Sanders?
Guest:Yeah, I was at Larry Sanders, which was the greatest, just the greatest thing to watch.
Guest:And, you know, no one wanted her to do it.
Guest:I remember when they were asking her to do it, I was still in Washington.
Guest:I remember coming out of the White House on a cell phone like the size of, you know, a toaster.
Guest:And she's telling me, you know, I love the show because we'd seen season one.
Guest:I thought it was the greatest thing ever.
Guest:And they're going, no, it's HBO.
Guest:Because in those days, you know, she could get 22 episodes on NBC or CBS.
Yeah.
Guest:in and and plus the second payment because they're going to rerun everybody you know so the money was gigantically higher on the on cbs than it would have been on hbo so none of her representatives want her to do what we think is the best show on television yeah when we're watching sure and so she you know she did it you know and you guys split up and like yeah not i don't know i don't know mid-90s yeah somewhere i don't know so you're all right you're co-parenting yeah the parenting thing um
Guest:The parenting thing should mean that you are friends and partners for life.
Guest:It should mean that.
Guest:And if it doesn't, you better figure out how to make it mean that.
Marc:I think that's true.
Marc:And sometimes it's a rough maybe couple years transition.
Marc:Yeah, we didn't have a rough time.
Guest:That's good.
Marc:We really never had a rough time with that.
Marc:We always understood what it was.
Marc:Yeah, it's heartbreaking when shit gets bad.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I've never had that, so I don't understand it.
Marc:All right, so you do all the West Wing, and then you get your own show on MSNBC, and that's your thing now.
Marc:That's what you do.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I, yeah, I guess it's my thing now.
Guest:And you're there every night.
Guest:No, I know.
Guest:I know.
Guest:You're right.
Guest:No, but see, this is, and this is the thing I've only realized recently is that how I've never, because I didn't ask for it.
Guest:I never asked for it.
Guest:I never asked to be a pundit on MSNBC.
Guest:I never asked for a show on MSNBC.
Guest:Never.
Guest:And what happened is I would go in as a substitute and the ratings would be very strong.
Guest:Sometimes like Ed or who?
Guest:The biggest, the reason they said we need you to do a show is that I went in for Keith Olbermann when Keith was the number one show.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And I held his rating.
Guest:It was the same.
Guest:The rating was just the same.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and I didn't know that.
Guest:They told me that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so they shouldn't have told me that because I wouldn't have understood my negotiating position.
Guest:And so they just saw that and they went, oh, we really need you to do a show, which is exactly the way Rachel became a host.
Guest:Rachel Maddow substituted for Keith.
Guest:She did very well.
Guest:She held the rating.
Guest:They said, hey, let's put her on right after Keith.
Marc:I was on Air America with her.
Marc:Air America, she got hired to be a newsreader.
Marc:And then it just became clear, like, she, like, do you ever watch her do her research?
Marc:I mean, like.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:I mean, she, like, for, like, she would do this two-hour show on radio, which, if you break it down, is not incredibly long.
Marc:But she would, like, ten hours, all night.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:With papers everywhere.
Marc:She still do that?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:The papers everywhere?
Guest:So I finally, like, agree, like, okay.
Guest:And I didn't want to do it because my daughter was still in high school and I didn't want to be in New York that much.
Guest:And, you know, when you don't want to do something, it means if they really want you to do it, then it just gets more and more advantageous.
Marc:Especially if you don't give a fuck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I finally, you know, agreed to it.
Guest:And I see the way Rachel does her work.
Guest:I look at that and I go, okay.
Guest:So that's what it takes to be number one.
Guest:You've got to do a minimum of 12 hours of preparation for the show.
Yeah.
Guest:how many hours do you have to do to be number two?
Guest:And it turns out it's nowhere near what you have to do to be number one.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:Like nowhere close.
Guest:And by the way, that's the Irish choice.
Guest:I was just going to say, there's the Irish.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Number two is perfectly fine with me.
Marc:It's fine with me.
Marc:All right, man.
Marc:Well, good job on the book.
Marc:Good job on the show.
Guest:You're doing a good thing.
Marc:I don't know what I'm doing on the show.
Marc:Well, you know what?
Marc:I got to bring it up only because I saw it.
Marc:I watched the video.
Marc:Ah, yes.
Marc:But you know what?
Marc:It didn't surprise me, and you got off easy.
Marc:What video are you talking about?
Guest:You know what I'm talking about.
Marc:Yes, I do.
Marc:Because I'm a guy.
Marc:I'm hot-headed, and I've been in that seat before, and you have bad days, and sometimes there's a hammer.
Marc:But the truth of the matter is that it didn't surprise me, and it wasn't that bad.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Let me just say, I've not talked about it publicly.
Guest:I don't know how, but let me just say this, that I hate what I saw on the video.
Guest:I hate what it looks like.
Guest:Because what it looks like to most people is different from what it was, but I still hate it.
Guest:And I should know that things look different to people.
Guest:What did it look like?
Guest:It looks like, well, people characterized it as, look at him berating the employees.
Guest:No, this is man overboard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When you're yelling man overboard on a boat, you're not yelling at the crew.
Guest:You're going, hey, this is a crisis.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I have no hiring.
Guest:Irish man overboard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I am no one's boss in that place.
Guest:They tell me there was way more yelling in the control room at each other.
Guest:try that switch, try that switch.
Guest:And they yelled down to other control rooms.
Guest:And the other part of it is, and I hate trying to like be defensive and get myself out of the box I deserve here, but I'm in a glass enclosed soundproof studio.
Guest:I can see through the glass out there that there are some guys out there who are available to go try to find the guy who's hammering somewhere up here on top of my head.
Guest:So when I'm yelling to them,
Guest:I'm trying to yell through soundproof glass.
Guest:They know me.
Guest:I know them.
Guest:They're not even looking in my direction.
Guest:Then they are.
Guest:No one in the control room can talk to them because they don't have headsets on.
Guest:They finally figure it out.
Guest:So what it was was this man overboard kind of, how do we fix this?
Marc:Well, a lot of things going on at once.
Marc:You got the problem in your ear.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And there's a moment in the tape there.
Guest:And by the way, that eight minutes, that covers the entire hour.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So there's a lot of quiet, calm stuff.
Guest:It's just like it's ongoing.
Guest:There's a moment in the tape where this person keeps talking in my ear.
Guest:It's as if right now, if we started picking up someone's phone call right now, you know, you'd go.
Guest:So there's someone in my ear and I say, oh, so now I know this can happen.
Guest:Like I've been doing this for six years, seven years.
Guest:I didn't know that could happen.
Guest:Like now I know this can happen.
Guest:And so I, you know, I mean- And it's live, right?
Guest:You're going live.
Guest:And it's all live.
Guest:And I come from the worst possible training for live because filmmaking, you know, I mean, a West Wing episode is a, we shot it in 35 millimeter film.
Guest:We took six weeks to come up with a script.
Guest:You take six weeks of production and you know, you've done a series and you go into post-production.
Guest:And you can redo things even in post-production if you have to because what you're going for in any episode of television, no matter what it is, what you're going for is perfection.
Guest:Now, someone might say, I didn't like that scene.
Guest:You're talking about the writing.
Guest:Okay, that's our fault.
Guest:But...
Guest:No one's saying, boy, the lighting was really dumb in that scene, or what was the hammering?
Guest:Like, when Mark was doing that scene, what was the hammering?
Guest:Because we took that out, and we have complete control over that.
Guest:So I came from a world where the thing that appears within the television screen
Guest:has been worked to its perfection.
Guest:And I didn't realize that I'm in exactly the opposite arena.
Guest:And this is how dumb I am.
Guest:I didn't realize it until now.
Guest:I didn't realize it until I saw that video and I went, well, okay, no one told you that that could happen.
Guest:But you never fully embraced the work of this job to investigate everything that could happen so that you personally, when you go out there, know what this thing is that you're stepping into.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I never really did.
Guest:So now I know, like, if I go out there, there could be anything.
Guest:And my job is to deal with that.
Guest:You know, like, I watch Anderson Cooper and those guys standing out in the rain, you know, live, and they're fine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I could never do a second of standing in the hurricane, getting rain in my face, talking to... I couldn't do one second of it.
Guest:I'm not a real anchorman, but I still have an obligation to get my readiness up to the point where if suddenly there's a rainstorm in this protected studio...
Marc:uh i somehow keep going yeah but it wasn't it wasn't one because you can handle breaking news you can handle changing the trajectory of the story but like when you were there like and i've been in those situations where whatever anyone thinks about the job when you're on television or you know you have this downtime and shit isn't working out it's just sort of like can we just get this working because it's annoying you know right but you know when i'm yelling things like you know call phil griffin it's not at a
Guest:person no no and phil griffin doesn't think i'm yelling and so and in my neighborhood by the way if you were talking in any volume less than that no one thought you were serious right so i imagine from talking to you that the thing that was the most horrifying was you saw your neighborhood come exactly i spent my entire life trying to suppress the stuff that's in that video and listen people who've known me 20 years yeah 20 years let's say male female right 20 years they would go
Guest:So you have a temper?
Guest:Come on.
Guest:Really?
Guest:You're going to give yourself cancer.
Guest:The only people who've ever seen- Are you a man of faith?
Guest:The only people who've ever seen anything that's like that are my brothers.
Guest:And I will yell at them.
Guest:They will yell back at me.
Guest:I'll go, are you crazy?
Guest:That would be stupid to get that mortgage.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:And I have to say that in order for him to think I'm serious.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like if I don't yell at him about what a mistake that mortgage is, he won't think I really mean it.
Marc:Well, I think there's an opportunity here, Lawrence, to maybe do a whole show in the tone of that outtake tape.
Marc:But focus it.
Guest:Focus it in the right place.
Guest:No, there's a West Wing writer who is now an Oscar winner, Josh Singer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he had this idea for a show when he and I were writing at the West Wing.
Guest:And it was to be online because you couldn't do it anywhere else and it was called You Stupid Fuck.
Guest:And I would be the host of the show and he would be the guest.
Guest:He'd be the permanent guest.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he would say something to me like...
Guest:So why doesn't Obama try to get the Republicans to agree to the health care bill?
Guest:And every answer I would... And it's the guest questions the host.
Guest:And I'm sitting at the Johnny Carson desk like this.
Guest:And every one of my answers was to begin with, you stupid fuck.
Guest:The reason...
Guest:Because, you know, Josh Singer went to Yale and Harvard Law School, okay?
Guest:He was the only person at the Western, because he went to Yale and Harvard Law School, that when the door was closed and we were talking about a story, I could say to him anytime I wanted to, you stupid fuck.
Guest:Because the one thing we were both sure of is he's not a stupid fuck.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:But you could just like, you could use that as your opening reaction to his idea about why we should not do an episode.
Marc:And everybody relates to that, because that's why we have the president we have now.
Right, right.
Guest:yes it's exactly that anger that you've been hiding it's driven this guy into office no i i've i've i it's it's you know what it is it's this thing that anthropologists see it's like a residual piece of dna that's still left uh it's been bred out though it dies with me oh yeah okay it's gone okay okay we'll see we'll see we'll talk to your daughter in 10 years no it's i promise you it's gone it's gone
Guest:Okay.
Guest:All right.
Guest:All right.
Guest:I believe you.
Guest:Thanks for talking, man.
Guest:This was fun.
Marc:See, I waited until the end, but I brought up a little thing, and I think he handled it well.
Marc:I think he handled it all right.
Marc:Don't forget, if you haven't gotten a copy of Waiting for the Punch yet and you want one signed by me, you can get it at podswag.com slash punch.
Marc:That's P-O-D-S-W-A-G dot com slash punch.
Marc:Dig it.
Marc:I want to thank all the people that came out to third place books up there in Seattle for the book signing.
Marc:Brendan and I had a great time.
Marc:It was great meeting everybody.
Marc:That's a really amazing bookstore up there, that place.
Marc:It was nice to be in such a well-stocked and crowded independent bookstore.
Marc:And as always, again, great to see all the fans of the show.
Marc:Great to meet everybody.
Marc:Thank you for coming out.
Marc:I wish I had more time to spend in Seattle, but I did not this time.
Marc:I love it up there.
Marc:Every time I'm up there, I just want to keep moving north.
Marc:Keep going.
Marc:Keep going.
Marc:On to the islands.
Marc:On to the islands.
Marc:Maybe one day.
Marc:Maybe one day.
Marc:I will be on those islands.
Marc:Maybe that's where I'll end up.
Marc:I can only hope.
Guest:Boomer lives!