Transcript
0:03 Thank you. First of all, thank you for that welcome. This has been. Even though I lived in Iowa, this is my first trip here. It has been great. Someone said, well, what brought you out here? I mean, why did you decide to do this address? I said, because I could come and see it. So it is a huge benefit to me to come and talk with some of you all and meet you all and to be here on your day.
0:34 Congratulations. President Morris, members of the board of trustees, the faculty staff, the parents. Thank you all for being so welcoming. Just a quick story since he's here and I can embarrass him. I won a second Emmy at some point in my career. Career. And I called my youngest son. I have two sons, and I called my youngest, and I said, oh, guess what, honey? I won the second Emmy for whatever it was for.
1:05 And he said, oh, mom, that's wonderful. That's great. That's so cool. Because now when you die, we can both have one, Which is why you have children, because they keep you humble and on point. But I know you love me. It's okay. I learned so much along the way. You know that book about everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten. It's not true. Every day you should learn something.
1:36 And the job I have has enabled me to learn so much from so many people. So I want to bring their lessons here to you in the hopes that one or two of them will have some residents and you can walk away from here with your great degrees and go do great things, as I know you all will. Bob Dole. I covered him in 96. He was a Republican who ran for president, and he had what he called the three Bs of speech making, which is beyond time.
2:00 Be brief. Be seated. So I am going to try to live up to the Bob Dole standard of how you do these things. But I wanted to start out with a story of two men who grew up in the civil rights era. One of them is John Lewis. If you don't know who John Lewis is, you should look him up. He is, to me, a hero walking this earth. He was, at one point, the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the South.
2:32 He was an original member of the Freedom Riders who rode through the south trying to integrate segregated bus stations. He was the leader of a march that became known as Bloody Sunday from Selma to Montgomery. They were told to stop by state police as they were trying to register new voters. And when they kneeled down to pray, the protesters were beaten. John Lewis nearly lost his life In a couple of these events, he was the keynote speaker at the March on Washington with Martin Luther King.
3:04 So he is the fiercest quiet man I have ever known in my life. He is quite the guy. And he was always out there. And we have this piece that we do on CNN that we put up on our website, and it's called Getting to Know. And it was based on my theory that you all, when you watch TV or have time for it, you see what we call talking heads. And that's really how you view them.
3:27 They are flat caricatures. And this guy is a rabid right person, and this one's a loony left person. And you don't really know who they are. And I thought if we could just ask them questions about their life, maybe we could put that up on the website. And people say, well, that guy said this. I want to go see, because I feel like if you know where people came from, you can understand where they are. And so John Lewis came on, and I've known him for some time.
3:52 And I said, john, were you ever scared? You were beaten. People were dying all over the south for civil rights at the time that he was fighting for it. And he said, no, because I knew that regardless of what happened, this movement was right and this movement would go on. I wasn't afraid. At another point, I interviewed Herman Cain. He was an African American Republican. John Lewis is a Democrat from Georgia. Herman Cain is a Republican from Georgia.
4:19 He ran this time around for president. And in the getting to know questions, one of my producers had said to me, did you know that Herman Cain cuts his own hair? I said, well, that's kind of interesting. So I said to him, so I understand you cut your own hair. He said, yep, I have for 35 years. And I said, really? I said, why do you cut your own hair? And he said, you know, when Cain was growing up, he was offered to be one of the first African Americans to help integrate schools in and around Atlanta.
4:47 And he went to his father, and his father said, well, I don't know that you could concentrate on your studies if you become a part of this, but it's up to you. You do what you want, but you have to excel. Herman Cain chose to stay in his all black at that point school. He graduated with honors from high school. He went on to get a college degree. He went into the Navy. He was a successful businessman.
5:09 He started God's Father's Pizza. He was on the Federal Reserve Board, ultimately ran for president. So he told me that part of his Life and his father and how he did not join in, did not want to be part of the class that was helping to integrate, and he stayed in his school. And he said, when I was in the Navy, I went up to Washington on an assignment. And he said, I was in Virginia, and I walked by a barber shop and I thought, oh, I need a haircut.
5:33 And there were three black barbers and in there. And so he said, I went in and I sat down. Because in the south, you sit down and you just sort of wait for someone to call you and you go up and get your hair cut. And he said, I waited and someone would come in, they take that person, someone else would come in. They never did me. So I went up and I said to one of the barbers, hey, I need to get a haircut.
5:50 And the black barber said to Herman Cain, you know, we can't cut black hair here. You have to go on the other side of the Sears and Roebuck, there's a barbershop that will cut black hair. And Herman Cain walked out of that barbershop, walked into the Sears and Roebuck, bought himself a pair of shears, and has been cutting his own hair ever since. And I loved both those stories because they told you so much about who these men were and how they got to be who they are and how they got to believe what they believe.
6:29 And from them, what I drew was to get to where you want to go, you first have to stand and be who you are. And both of them stood in their own way to be who they were, to get where they got. And that's my first lesson that I pass along to you from them. I think the other thing I took from that is you do your revolution your way, but you have to let other people do their revolution their way.
7:00 I took that from them as well. 911 was a huge time, as you may know, for I think everybody looked inside themselves, went where they could for some peace, some calm, some unstressful times. I was on the streets of New York in the aftermath, where everyone was putting up posters, and there were so many stories that you talk to people about. And they all had stories, particularly about why their loved one was or was not in one of those Twin Towers.
7:32 And one of the stories, a woman said to me, you know, my husband is always in the Twin Towers in his office at 8:50, which would have been after the first plane struck. And she said, but today the cat threw up. And my daughter was so upset that my husband said, it's okay, honey. The cat's going to be fine. We'll clean it all up, and then I'll drive you to school. So he was late and was not in the building.
7:59 Someone else would say to you, my husband hasn't been in that. We've lived in New York for 30 years. My husband was never in that building except for a friend of his he hadn't seen since college came, and he wanted to take him up to give him the view of New York. And that's why he was in the building. And the more I heard those stories, everyone talked about how afraid they were after 9 11. And I realized that 911 made me braver, because the fact is that so much of life is random, as you probably already know, but it gets even more random as you move out there, that you take control of the broad sweeps of your life and then live it unafraid.
8:35 And I really felt like all of those people in New York taught me, sort of as a journalist, that you. You move through life freely, move through it unafraid, and keep going, and your life will take care of itself. Bottom line, as we like to say in news, my bottom line here is be unafraid to live your life. Charlie Rangel is a congressman from Harlem.
9:07 Longtime congressman. He is also a Korean War veteran. He won the Bronze Star. He won the Purple Heart for his activities in Korea. And I went to his office one day because I was doing a series in the run up to the Gulf War about what's it like to go to war, what's a young person thinking, you know, generally what that whole process is like. And so I said to him, he was showing that he had his medals in a little case someplace.
9:31 I said, oh, wow. I said, well, how'd you win these? Well, and it says on the thing. And he had. He was caught with his unit behind enemy lines. So he was in North Korea, and he was caught. And he led them out and back to safety under heavy fire. And I said, wow, so you're a hero. And he said, you know, the two people that were the head of the unit had died while we were there.
9:59 We were under heavy fires, and so I was the de facto head of the unit. He said, I had a compass and I got ahold of a map. I didn't have the slightest idea where I was going, but I knew if we stayed there, we'd all die. So I stood up and said, come on, men, follow me. And he said, and now they call me a hero. And I just imagine there are a lot of heroes out there that just went the wrong way.
10:22 They just went the wrong way. From that I came to know and believe and pass along to you that heroics are in the deed, not necessarily in where it goes. You can be heroic. You are sitting next to heroes. In many ways, I think we, we throw that term around a lot. But I loved the notion that here is this man that, you know, says, look, I just, I took a guess and went left. I could have gone right and it would have ended much differently.
10:51 But the deed itself is heroic, so go out and be heroic. In the same series that I did, I talked to a man named Tom Ridgefield, a Republican from Pennsylvania, Governor. He was the first Homeland Security Secretary. A tough guy, fought. He was a Marine, fought in Vietnam and was a grunt. I mean, not an officer. He was out there in the rice paddies in the jungles all day long for more than a year, and it was fairly horrific.
11:28 He had a hard time talking to me about it. And one of the sections of the stories that we did was called what lingers, meaning we're 30, 40, 50 years past. Some of these experiences. Experience what lingers with you when you think of this experience, what lingers? So I put that to Tom Ridge and he said to me, it's the nights. If you had time to think about them and you looked up into the stars, the stars were beautiful because there's no artificial illumination.
11:54 There you are in the middle of nowhere. And so on a moonlit night, it is just like dusk or dawn. It was very quiet, it was beautiful. So find the beauty wherever you are. It is there. Sometimes you have to look very hard for it. You've come to this amazing place, made an amazing decision to come here. It gets a little tougher as you all, some of you already know when you get out there. But the fact that this Marine, kind of in the middle of a country that he knew nothing about and could find, you know, couldn't find his way out of if he had tried.
12:31 And what he remembers from all of that experience and all of that kind of combat is how beautiful the night sky is in Vietnam. Find the beauty in what you're doing, regardless of what it is. So a couple of personal observations as well that I just learned from the fact that I was a single mom, I had a full time job and I was the first single mom actually on air at cnn.
13:01 That's how long ago that was. And everyone always says to me, how do you balance that? And we all know where you find balance, but the truth is, how do you put that balance into action in your day to day life? And I always thought of my life as a Bosu ball, as sort of standing on that ball where you achieve balance but then something does this so you've got to re achieve it. And that to me is the balance of life is that you're balance is a verb, it's a transitive verb.
13:30 It's something that moves. When I was in at home, working at work about 3 o', clock, my stomach started to hurt because I knew my children were coming home. And I always felt like I was in the wrong place. Like the balance is that I should be home when they were home. And yet in TV world, 3 o' clock is about when the action starts because you're driving for the 5, the 6 or the 7pm show.
13:54 So that's always when I was the busiest or always when my children would call and it was like a constant source of stress for me. And so they would be. I'd be sitting on the desk writing a story and crashing a story and trying to get something out. And someone would answer the phone being one of my children and they would call those. The Crowley kid calls. And so I get this Crowley kid call and I realize that, you know, there's no good way to handle this balance.
14:17 Like how do you balance, you know, this is not going to make air and that's my job and yet this is my child and nothing's more important. So I developed my own 3B plan which is the person answering the phone would say, is it broken, burning or bleeding? And if the answer was no, I would call them back. If it was yes, I got on the phone, only twice did they say yes. So it was a good plan.
14:41 So balance is that minute to minute, day to day thing that you try to achieve. I think that my mother used to call, I think this is a biblical reference. She used to talk about the still small voice within you that tells you what to do. You all know what to do. We all do. We sometimes don't do it, but we all know in a given situation what to do. And push came to shove for me at one point in my career.
15:08 Actually this wasn't all that long ago. In 2000, in the summer of 2000, George Bush, the son was running, hadn't picked his vice president yet and we knew the week he was going to announce it and it happened to be the same week as a long standing family reunion up in Michigan. And I thought, oy, yeah, in the office the pressure was very heavy and they said, well, no, he's going to announce as vice president, and la, la, la.
15:36 And I opted for the family reunion, mostly because I thought my mother would kill me. But I opted for the family reunion because I knew that still small voice said to me, when you're that unsure, you know the right thing to do is to go for the personal and not for the job. And in the end, we came up with what I used to call my deathbed test. And it was, what will I be thinking in my final hours?
16:04 And I was pretty sure at the time it would not be, dang, I wish I'd been there when George Bush announced Dick Cheney. So. When all else fails, give it the deathbed test. It will never fail you. I also have learned a little bit, believe it or not, from country western music, which some of you may or may not be familiar with.
16:35 One of my favorite songs think it's Garth Brooks. The refrain is, some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers. When I graduated from College, I was 20 years old. I was engaged to a man. I was going to move. He was finishing out his college. I was going to move with him to California. I was planning on having five boys with him. I was planning on ironing his shirts while he went to work.
17:07 And then at night, when everyone was quiet in bed, I was going to write the great American novel. None of this happened, and yet that was my dream. Now, what did happen was. I can tell you about a night I spent on the rooftop of an Italian restaurant looking out over the city of Marrakech. I can tell you about the night I slept in the Sahara with the king. Not with the king, but in the same.
17:38 Let me rephrase that. This is why you should write out specifically what you want to say. I was in the Sahara, and there were multiple tents, and I was in one of them and the king was in another. We were there. We were there on a Hillary Clinton trip. We got up early in the morning and rode camelback to the top of the dunes to watch the sunrise over the Sahara. I've been to China with three different presidents.
18:07 These things were so outside the framework of my ability to dream. So while I wish your dreams to come true, I also want to tell you that your best life may be in the undream. So watch for the undream. I also, in the news business, we call this burying the lead. I did marry a man I love very much.
18:38 I had two boys, and sometimes it seemed like 10. So we were good. It was quite the Experience. And again, not the. It was my undream and I am so happy my undream came true. You know this. Be honest. One of the things that I think makes relationships, whether it's with your children, your spouse, your friends, your parents, I used to say to my children all the time, I will go to the barricades for you, but I gotta know I've got the true story.
19:12 Because the minute I find out it's not the true story, I can't ever go to the barricades again because that faith is broken. So I think you not only have to be honest, you have to demand honesty in your life. It's not always easy to do. It's easier to hear a lie sometimes than the truth. But your relationships are better if you both give honesty and demand honesty.
19:42 And for my final point, which is my all time favorite and which has so enriched my life, and the one thing, if they said, tell them one thing, this is what I would have told you to do that. Since there are 37 countries represented here and people from all over, if you are not a basketball fan, I need to give you a definition. A point guard is the player who's responsible for directing the basketball team's attack.
20:11 He's leading the advance. That's what a point guard is. With that in mind, in the last election, I had a very rough time. I was not happy, I thought, in what was being asked of me. And I used my youngest son as a sounding board. And I would call him often in tears, which mothers shouldn't do. But I did. And I was so convinced that I could not continue with journalism anymore. I was worried about what it became.
20:41 I said, I can't do this. Because he'd say, well, mom, you know, but you're this kind of journalist. Do that. And I said, I can't, because they'll say this and then I do that and then they. And this, and I just don't know what to do. And everything's so. He would always sort of walk me off the edge of the cliff. And then one night we had one of those conversations and I was sitting so sure that I could not be who I wanted to be in the environment I was in.
21:04 And it was weighing on me heavily. And it was weighing on my work, I thought. And that worried me even more. And so I got a text message. And here's what the text message said. Mom, remember, it's like being a point guard. Run your offense the way you run it. Don't let them take you out of your game. I congratulate you. Go out there. Be point guards. Congratulations.