Affiliated with this college for your service. As acting president here and you have done, in my view, a seamless job of plugging the gap in this. Weve had here president s. I also want to single out gary greg. When this program started in the early 90s i had no idea it could develop into what it has become. You are the reason for that. Gary came here in 2000 and took it to a whole new level. I hope you will join me in thanking gary greg for his wonderful job. [applause] we have had a lot of interesting speakers over the years and in my view on more than interesting than our guest this morning. [laughter] chuck schumer, of course, is from brooklyn, born and raised. His dad owned an exterminator business and one of chucks siblings remembered that we always associated the smell of triple x broker spray with love. [laughter] it was his hard work day in and day out that took this kid from brooklyn the worlds greatest deliberative body the United States and. It is also my last year Time Mag
Thank you again. On the next washington journal, margot sangerkatz joins us, looking at Health Care Insurance and costs. Then Sharon Epperson on the 80th anniversary of Social Security and what the future holds for the program. Later, a conversation on the u. S. Foster care system, with the director of policy reform and advocacy. Well also take your phone calls, Facebook Comments and tweets. Washington journal, live each morning at 7 00 eastern on cspan. With the senate in its august break, well feature brook tv programming week nights, starting at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. For the weekends, here are a few special programs. Saturday, august 22nd, live from jackson, mississippi, for the mississippi book festival, beginning at 11 30 a. M. With discussions on harper lee, civil rights and the civil war. September 5th, were live from our nations capital. Followed on sunday with our live in depth program, with former second lady and senior fellow at the American Enterprise institute, lynn cheney.
It just fell together as i went along. I think one thing that struck me very dramatically was my decision to leave vietnam and to see how seductive war is. And i knew i didnt want to be someone who went from one war to the next and be kind of a war groupie, because i couldnt make a life. I wrote once that i wanted roots that went down to the source of water. And at the time, when i was in vietnam, i wasnt sure what that would have meant, and i was too young to be thinking about that, but when i went back to vietnam in 1989, it was the first time and i traveled with a small group from hanoi all the way through the country, and i was in saigon and did the memory walk of the places i had lived. And i realized, there was a moment when it just hit me. I thought of my daughter who was then 8. And i wanted to go home. And i miss the life that i had created. And i think that was when i really realized that i had, i had done that, that i had somehow chosen or life had chosen me. I didnt want to
Almost every single one of them saluted back. It was an incredibly moving experience, and you always have to wonder when youre talking about faces and people that you remember how it impacted the lives of those young men. I guess, among many other things, ive always wondered were they able to rebuild their lives and to have good families and decent jobs and to really have a decent life. I want to interrupt then and tell an anecdote. Im going to take one second here. I was inside the pentagon working on the morning of 9 11, and as we came to understand the people who perished inside the pentagon, there was a man, older man, civilian, worked for the department of the army. His name was max bilky. You know who max was. Max bilky died in the pentagon on 9 11. Max as a young army draftee is listed in American History as the last combat american soldier out of vietnam, and he came home and he had a good life. Thats good. By all accounts. And he died that morning. So vietnam, its just its jus
Covering battlefields, to bringing the stories of american troops fighting in faraway places into our living rooms, into the front page of our newspapers. If nothing else, that era was such a turn in journalism that i probably dont have to explain to anybody in this room. And i thought that if were not all totally familiar with these womens backgrounds, we would just start by going down the line and have all of you briefly tell us how you came to be in vietnam. Its a far away place a long time ago. Lets just go down the line for a few minutes here. How did you get there . I got there it seems hard to believe, but someone in our day, like barbara, would be a pentagon correspondent. We reported on things like parties and gardening and cooking. We never really made the news because womens lives were so confined that we had our section, but the stories of women werent even news because their lives were tiny and circumscribed, so i got very bored at my job. I was reading papers all the time