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
That was more important. When in the middle of that situation, the thenpublisher didnt want to give us an option to buy it. He had it was for sale for 150,000. But we needed 1 million in order to go into business because it was losing a certain amount of money every year. I had told ham, its useless if you dont have an option because who knows what will happen. So edgar came to a meeting with ralph nader, a man named ping ferry, who is a marvelous guy, and his wife, and ham and me, to get the option. They spoke eloquently, with edgar leading the way on why he ought to give the option and how, et cetera. So they had a funeral this morning for the family, and what i said there is i blame edgar for the next 20 years of my life, because he was as responsible as anyone else for my getting there. So i came to the nation when, finally, the funding was in place and we got the opportunity to go there. I, of course, had not finished naming names. I spent too much time raising money along with ha