Transcripts For CSPAN2 Booknotes 20140118 : vimarsana.com

Thinking out loud on the personal, the political, the public and the private. In her book ms. Quindlen discusses her book on a wide range of topics for what she calls a special lens of her gender. She includes commentary on such things as moral hypocrisy bigotry lying and violence. This interview is an hour. Cspan Anna Quindlen, in your new book, thinking out loud, you say that the i was trying to look at the words here that the best line in anything thats ever appeared under your byline is, could you get up and get me a beer without writing about it . Question mark. Who said that and why did you write it . Guest my husband said it to me one night. And i must say, its so embarrassing to have this kind of mindset about everything, but the moment he finished that sentence, i said to him, can i use that . I just thought it was the best thing id ever heard about what i do for a living, which is that everything becomes grist for the mill. Cspan how much have you told the public in your columns in the past about your private, personal life . Guest ive told them a fair amount about my kids, i think, more than anyone else, except for myself. Ive told them a whole lot about myself and some about my husband and my friends. But in the oped page column ive been writing for the last three years, ive scaled back on that a good bit, first of all, because my kids are older and they can read now. And second of all, because i wanted in this column to bring more reporting about the world to bear on my personal opinions and less reporting about my own life. Cspan you talk about the fact that youre the third woman in history to have an oped column in the New York Times. Who were the other two . Guest anne ohare mccormick, who wrote about foreign affairs, and flora lewis, who also wrote about foreign affairs, actually. Ann ohare mccormick in the 40s and 50s, and flora up until quite recently several years ago. Cspan why does the New York Times only have one woman . Guest thats a very good question. The answer is that i hope in the foreseeable future, well have more than one. But so far, its only me. Id like to see us have three or four women writing on the oped page. And its not just us. I mean, i mention in the book at some point, that at one point, i was at a gathering of editors from outoftown papers and one of them said to me without a hint of thinking he was saying anything peculiar, id love to run your column, but we already run ellen goodman. And clearly the idea was, theyd filled the womans seat. Just as theres a womans seat on the Supreme Court, theres a womans seat on the oped page. Thats got to stop, the idea that you need one woman columnist, one black columnist and everybody else can be liberal or conservative white men. Cspan when does your column appear . Guest wednesdays and sundays in the times. And then in papers across the country, a variety of days, depending on what the oped page editor wants to do. Cspan do you have any idea how many papers its published in . Guest we think a little over 100 at this point, although its difficult to keep track of them because of our syndication system. But with the list of names that weve developed, we think that thats just about right. Cspan is there another city where you find yourself more popular than others . Guest chicago, i find that theres a pretty good reaction. Chicago seems to be a city that really loves its columnists. I mean, you know, chicago and royko or chicago and Clarence Page or bob greene. They take columnists very much to their heart and i ran there when i was writing a column once a week called, life in the 30s, so that by the time i started this column and the Chicago Tribune picked it up, it was probably the only city that i visited in which people would recognize me on the street. So i feel pretty at home in chicago at this point. Cspan as i told you before this show started now this discussion started that on my way here, everybody kept telling me, oh, i saw Anna Quindlen on television the other night. Some people had it on 20 20, others had it on primetime live. And of course, this is recorded for our audience, you know, weeks before we get it on the air. But whats going on here with Anna Quindlen . How come all of a sudden on Primetime Television . Guest well, i think its the book. I try to keep a low profile about things like that. You know, i get asked to be on television a fair amount, and first of all, i dont have a whole lot of free time because any time that im not working on the column, im usually with my kids. And second of all, i sort of dont like the idea of dissipating the energy that i bring to writing the column in talking out how i feel about issues beforehand. But because of having the book published, there was a certain interest in doing it and so i agreed to this. But it was pretty tense the magazine showpiece, just because they followed me for a long time and i began to feel like i was going to spend the rest of my life with a battery pack in the pocket of my coat. Cspan when did they start following you . Guest oh, i guess it was three or four weeks ago, and they were with me for days and days when i did some reporting. They went with me to a Family Planning clinic, and when i won an award, and when i went to talk to High School Students and when i went into the office, and so on and so forth. Cspan what was the reaction of people around you as you had a camera following you everywhere . Guest it was really funny because people couldnt quite figure out why. I mean, heres this very ordinarylooking woman in a raincoat reading the newspaper on the train, and how come theres a camera crew around her but inevitably, theyd say well, whats going on here . Whats going on here . And some woman would tell them who i was and theyd either just look even more puzzled and walk on, or a couple of women would walk into the frame and say, i love your column. I never miss it, which is always a great feeling. Cspan what was the experience like after you were able to see the piece when it was done . Guest well, it was strange. I mean, i feel a little selfconscious about seeing myself on television. It always gives, to me, new meaning for the phrase warts and all. I mean, im always looking for the and all. But i actually thought it was a very nice piece and that they captured something about how to try to balance my personal and my public life. Cspan did you change your personality at all at any point when you knew you were on television . Guest i dont think so. I felt a little inhibited in terms of saying things. And, of course, i cleaned up my mouth a little bit. But, no i mean, after a while i think the dangerous thing was that i got used to wearing that mike and that battery pack and just went on my merry way but i dont feel like i changed my personality much. Cspan this book, thinking out loud on the personal, the political, the public and the private, has how many columns of yours . Guest i think its 87 87, 88, Something Like that, close to 100. And then it has a new long section that i wrote especially for this book about being a woman, growing up in the newspaper business and then four essays that begin each of the sections of the book. Cspan and who chose the columns . Guest i did. Cspan over what time span . Guest the columns ran over about two and a half years, and i just picked whatever i liked. Cspan and why do you think Something Like this sells . Guest well, you know, i feel sort of funny about pulling together collections of my columns, because i think, you already did this. You know, when i was publishing my novel, object lessons, i felt this is a brandnew thing and im sort of entitled. But readers tell me over and over again that they like it, first of all, because theyve clipped these things out and saved them, and they turn this horrible orange color and start to fall apart after a couple of months or so. And second of all, because putting them together with likeminded columns gives them a way of looking at the issue that they didnt quite have when i did, oh, one abortion column in february, another one in april, another one in july, another one in november. So that what i found with the first collection i did, which was a collection of my life in the 30s columns, was that people really, really liked having them together all in one place. Cspan where did you grow up . Guest philadelphia. Cspan where in philadelphia . Guest the philadelphia suburbs, in a place called drexel hill. Cspan what did your parents do . Are they still alive, by the way . Guest my mother died 21 years ago, but my fathers a management consultant, or as he described it to me when i was a little girl, he is a doctor for sick companies. Cspan does he still live there . Guest no, he doesnt. He lives in new jersey now. Cspan how many brothers and sisters . Guest im the oldest of five. I have three brothers and a sister whos 11 years younger than i am. Cspan when you were growing up, what were the big influences on your life . Guest oh, the biggest influence had to be the catholic church. Im from a very large, sprawling, Irish Catholic family thats very involved in its own ethnicity. I mean, it was sort of incredible to me when i got to college and found out there were people who didnt know exactly where their family had come from and feel that that meant exactly something about them. But the church was such a huge influence in all our lives. I went to Catholic School for 10 years. That i would say that that was the single biggest influence other than my mom and dad. Cspan what kind of an influence did it have on you . Guest i think a way of looking at the world. I was just saying to someone today that in an odd kind of way, i think im a liberal because i was raised a catholic, with a sense that you had to be fair to other people and that you had to help take care of people who were less fortunate than you were, and that everyone was sort of your neighbor and you had an affirmative responsibility toward them, and i think that sense of family and community that grew out of knowing that we were all part of this together and that we were related by religion. Cspan where did you go to college . Guest i went to barnard, the Womans College of columbia university. Cspan what did you study . Guest i was an English Literature major. Cspan and why . Guest an English Literature major . Cspan yeah. Guest because the idea of just getting to read for four years. I mean, if i could do that now, just to read its just my favorite thing in the whole world to do. And im always finding writers that i missed either because of my concentration, which tended to be on certain writers. Im a very big dickens fan and i did all the studying of dickens work that i could do in college. But a couple of years ago, i realized that i had never read trollope and that seemed to me a huge gap in my education. So over the last two years, i guess, ive been engaged in reading the palliser series of trollope. And right now, im in the middle of the last book. So i mean, the idea of being able to study fiction, it just to me is heaven. Cspan who got you interested in reading and english . Guest oh, i dont know. I just remember always taking a lot of pleasure out of reading. I was a very fanciful little girl and the opportunity to go other places and meet other people just by sitting in the big chair in our living room and burrowing down into a book i mean, i remember unceasing efforts on my mothers part to get me to go outside and play because it was a beautiful day. And it never did a bit of good when i was inside with a good book. Cspan what did you do after college . Guest actually, during college, i was working parttime, during summers and holidays, for the New York Post, which was then owned by a woman named dorothy shiff. And i had a wonderful time there and learned so much, since i knew almost nothing, about my business. And so for the two years after i graduated from barnard, i continued to work at the post. Cspan what did you do there . Guest i was a general assignment reporter in new york city. I mean, i covered anything that came down the pike, from celebrity interviews, to Police Commission hearings, to city hall, to fifth avenue, and really learned a lot about the city, about writing. It was a place where we were really urged to bring bright writing to newspaper stories. And it really set me up, i think, for the rest of my career. Cspan what year did you get out of college . Guest 74. Cspan and so youve been in new york city for the last what . 18, 19 years. Guest no, longer than that. I came in 1970 to go to college, so, yeah, i guess, 20 22, 23 years, Something Like that. Cspan when you think about those days at the New York Post and stories that youve covered that have memories, name a couple. Guest oh, gosh. I remember covering the first hearings that became so famous about corruption in the nursing home system in new york city and how badly elderly people were treated, which made a huge impression on me. I remember doing a profile of sean connery and not being able to get a word out of him for almost the entire interview and then going back and rewinding my tape and opening the tape recorder and finding out that there was less than that on the tape and having to write a piece about how monosyllabic hed been and how overwhelmed by his sex appeal id been. I remember covering jerry brown during the 1976 primary race, which was a great introduction to the craziness of politics for me, and just your runofthemill murders and mayhem in new york and just learning how to get around, learning how to deal and learning how helpful my colleagues could be. Its funny, i still work with people in new york city who first worked with me when i was 19 or 20 years old and you really remember the guys who said to you, did you get the quote . Were you here the last time he did this . Because the guys who didnt ever say overtly, look, kid, youre out of your league, but who helped you out over and over again. Cspan are you surprised at what youre doing today . Guest i dont feel that way now, but i feel like if i could have looked ahead 10 years ago, i would be flabbergasted at the idea that id be doing an oped page column. But now, because ive done two other columns for the times, a column called about new york and then life in the 30s, i feel like its been sort of a natural progression. Im still delighted by what im doing today. Cspan how long did you work at the New York Post . Guest i was there after college for two, two and a half years and then in 1977, i went to the times. Cspan when did you meet your husband . Guest oh, i met him in 1970. Cspan where . Guest our freshman year in college. He was at. Cspan what. Guest . Columbia and i was at barnard. Cspan whats his name . Guest his name is jerry curvatin. Cspan what does he do . Guest hes a Trial Attorney a very good Trial Attorney, actually. Cspan how did you meet him . Guest someone actually sort of fixed us up. A guy from oregon that we both knew realized we were both from new jersey and thought this was an amazing coincidence, not understanding that at columbia university, about half the students were from new jersey. And so he brought us together and sort of i never looked back. Cspan and do you both agree on politics . Guest we agree a lot on politics. I think my husbands more pragmatic than i am and more hardheaded, slightly more conservative but not much. And i think overall, we find ourselves in considerable agreement about things. Cspan you mentioned earlier youre a liberal . Guest oh, yeah. Cspan what does that mean . Guest it means that i dont yearn for the way things were and i dont honor the status quo. Im always looking at how things can be. Cspan if you were to pick lets just for the fun of it pick five different subjects and talk about what it is to be a liberal in those subjects. Lets take. You write a lot about it in your columns, the gulf war. If youre a liberal, where would you have stood on the gulf war . Guest i was opposed to the gulf war and i thought that that was in some sense a classic liberal position because we didnt have i didnt think we had real good reasons for going in when we did. And i thought we were being somewhat misleading about those reasons from the getgo. The idea of liberating kuwait never seemed to me to be really what was going on and it took us some months before we finally admitted that we were really concerned about americas oil supplies. Cspan did you know any liberals that were for it . Guest oh, yeah. Sure. In fact, i think probably more than any other issue that ive written about in the three years that ive been an oped page columnist, there were the majority of people on both sides of the ideological fence who wound up across from the table from me on that one. I mean, there was this hard core of conservatives who were opposed to intervention in the gulf war, too, but overwhelmingly the conservatives i knew and most of the liberals thought that that on balance, we should send in the troops. Cspan i dont know where it is. Ive marked it in here, but someplace in here in one of those columns on the gulf war, you predicted, without hesitation, that george bush was going to be reelected in 1992. Guest and that if he ran with colin powell, it would be the largest landslide in american history. Yes, i have that column on my Bulletin Board to remind me about the sin of hubris. Cspan is that why you put it in the book . Guest its not why i put it in the book. I put it in the book because it was a column that had many other things in it, but its also useful to know when people have said things that they shouldnt have said because they thought they were taking the long view, only the long view in america only lasts about 60 to 90 days. Cspan you write a lot about abortion. Guest yes. Cspan whats the liberal position on abortion . Guest i think it is that thats a matter of individual choice and personal liberty. Cspan do you still practice your catholicism . Guest yes, i do. Cspan how do get along with your view on abortion and the church now . Guest well, i dont really think of myself as having a relationship with the institutional church; that is, the hierarchy. But in terms of my own conscience and my ability to feel confident about taking the sacraments and my relationship with god, i dont have any problem with that. Cspan as a liberal, what do you think of bill clinton . Guest as a liberal, i like lots of what bill clinton has done so far. But i worry when he seems to be too worried about making everyone like him, without exception. So that i was saddened by his decision to do with the haitian refugees exactly what the Bush Administration had done, which is to send them back home without giving them a fair hearing on political asylum. And i think he needs to press harder on removing the hiv exclusion for immigrants and refugees coming to this country. But on abortion, certainly i think hes done very, very well since hes been president in a very nonhistrionic and matteroffact sort of way. And on his economic plan, i think he has really succeeded in focusing the attention of the country on deficit reduction. Now hes going to have to come up with much larger spending cuts to go with that focus. Cspan is he a liberal . Guest yes. Hes not as liberal as i am though. Cspan and other than what you just mentioned, how would you i mean, whats the difference . Guest i think every indication about governor clinton was that he can be extremely pragmatic and that sometimes he is willing to shave a little bit off the principle and to do what works. Hes also not been loath to carry out the Death Penalty in arkansas, and we part company in a major way there. I think probably because of the job i do, i have the luxury of being a little more of an ivory tower liberal than he gets to be. Cspan on race what does it mean to be liberal . Guest well, on race, i think what it means to be human is that youre just fair to everybody, regardless of the circumstances under which they were born and the attributes they have. But i think what it means to be liberal is that you understand that there is an unmistakable synergy between race and poverty in this country and that, therefore, many of the things that come with poverty devolve disproportionately on africanamericans and latinos, and that its important for government to take that particular bull by the horns in terms of social services, in terms of terms of schools and in terms of how it handles all aspects of Crime Prevention and the poor neighbors in which crime is disproportionately played out and in which its disproportionately black people who are the victims. Cspan on health care whats it mean to be liberal . Guest i think it means that you believe that there should be a National Healthcare policy that provides some reasonable level of Health Insurance for all of our citizens. Cspan are most columnists in this country in newspapers liberal or conservative . Guest i think many more are liberal than conservative. When you talk to people who are trying to decide what syndicated columnist to put on their page, theyll tell you that they have a much easier time finding liberal men than they do finding conservative men, women or black columnists. In fact, someone only half in jest asked me one day if i knew of anyone writing in the United States who was a conservative africanamerican woman columnist. And i had to tell them that i didnt and i was not sure i would because people generally dont act against selfinterest. Cspan whats the difference between the way you write almost every week in your columns and the editorial position of the New York Times . Guest well, first of all, the editorial position of the New York Times relies a good deal on conversation and consensus. I was saying today that i wish there was a better way to let the readers know how we do what we do, because its really fascinating. I mean, they get these 10 or 12 people around a big table and some of them know everything about certain subjects. And they bat ideas back and forth. And theres a great deal of disagreement and a great deal of twocents thrown in, and out of this, we cobble together a series of editorials every day, which are then looked over and refined by the editorial page editor. So its much more of a collaborative process. Whereas what i do is very much, you know, the sound of one woman clapping, as it were. Cspan do you sit on the Editorial Board . Guest no, i dont. Cspan do you sit in on the meetings. Guest i can if i want to, but i havent for a while. I did for the first few months that i was writing my column and im welcome to drop in any time, but in general i dont. Cspan if you werent a woman, would you be a columnist for the New York Times, in your opinion . Guest i dont know the answer to that. I think theres many jobs that i held at the times for which i was moved forward quite quickly because there was inadequate representation by women in a particular area, and that one job led to another and led to another and led to another. Given my background and given the other things ive done at the paper, it wasnt really going too far afield for the publisher to offer me an oped page column, but one job after another was a job in which i was the first woman and i think at a comparatively young age, and im not sure that would have happened if it hadnt of been for gender. Cspan you went to the times in 77. Guest right. Cspan the New York Times. Guest right. Cspan how did it progress to the time that you got your column . Guest i started out as a general assignment reporter, just covering whatever came up that day, which is a terrific job. And then in i guess it was 1978 i have a hard time keeping track of it i covered the first two years of the Koch Administration down at city hall. And then when i came back up to work in the office again, i was given a column to write called about new york, which is an old traditional column at the New York Times in which you write twice a week a reporting column in which you write twice a week about anything you care to about new york city. And i left that column because i became deputy metropolitan editor of the paper. And i left as deputy metropolitan editor because in the space of about two years, i had two children who were quite close in age and i felt that it would be impossible for me to have a fulltime job at the paper and still spend as much time as i wanted with my children. I felt like id be missing all the good stuff at home. So six months after our second son was born, Abe Rosenthal asked me if i wanted to do a onceaweek column to keep my hand in and that was the column called life in the 30s. And i did that for three years and ended that because i gave birth to our third child. Theres a pattern emerging here. And when i was deciding to leave the paper at that point, because i thought i sort of topped out, the publisher offered me the oped page column. Cspan could you still write a column about life in the 30s . Guest no, i couldnt. Ill be 41 in july. Cspan how old are you children . Guest my children are nine, seven and four. Cspan their gender . Guest i have two sons, the nineyearold and the sevenyearold, and then a daughter. Cspan how do you and your husband do it now . What kind of a day do you have . Guest well, we have a babysitter who comes in every day at about 9 00. I take the three children to school first thing in the morning and then im usually back home by quarter till 9, 9 00, which is when elaine, our sitter gets there. And i usually work pretty much nonstop from 9 until 3 30 or 4. Some days, elaine goes and picks the kids up; some days i do. And then usually ill knock off then and be with them from 4 till about 8 or 8 30 when they head to bed. And then on certain evenings, ill work for another hour or two, sometimes three. And on other evenings, ill just sort of collapse and read. Since my husband is so often trying cases, he works much longer hours than that and so he spends less time with the kids during the week, although both of us sort of have an inviolate weekend time. I dont do any sort of workrelated thing except to go over my column on saturday with the copy editor. And from friday afternoon till monday morning, its basically just the five of us together. Cspan im not looking for the address, but where do you live . Guest we live in hoboken. Cspan so you live in new jersey. Guest right across the river from manhattan. Cspan how often do you go in to the New York Times . Guest i usually go in once every two weeks or so to look over my mail and see what my assistant thinks i need to take care of over the long term. But i do an enormous amount of business by modem on my computer. I can get the wires now on my computer at home and send memos back and forth to various people in the office, and so the technology has freed me up to spend most of my work time in my home office. Cspan how many words do you write for each column . Guest about 760, 770, depending on how long the words are and whether ive got a little more or a little less space that day. Cspan whose got the last word on what goes in that column . Guest i do. No one except for the copy editor, who generally handles things like punctuation or length, sees our columns until they actually go in the paper. So theres no veto power by anyone except for your own good sense and judgment. We even write our own headlines for our columns. Cspan oh, you do . Guest oh, yeah, which is should be pretty clear to you if you read mr, william safires headlines. Hes sort of famous for pushing to the limit the punability. Or i remember he wrote one not too long ago about paul tsongas. Now it was about the womanizing question, the bad conduct no, the womanizing question Something Else and paul tsongas, and it was called wine, women and tsong tsong. And i almost called him and said, all right. You win this year. Cspan what about your column, though, that goes out beyond the New York Times . Do you also write those headlines . Guest no, they do that themselves. But the times ones what you see on the times oped page, weve done our headlines ourselves. Cspan how long has that been a tradition . Guest as long as i know of. I mean, i got to tell you, i was never so blindsided in my life as when i filed my first column, and after i had filed it, the copy editor called me and said, well, whats your headline . I said, wait a minute. I dont write headlines. Editors write headlines. But once i got used to it, i got to really like it. Cspan and what about the people that write oped pieces . Do they get to write their headlines, too . Guest no, they dont. They dont. Its just us. I guess the feeling is that were so completely independent that every step of the product ought to belong to us. Cspan how many columnists are there that write regularly for the New York Times . Guest theres six of us now. Were short one since mr. Tom wicker retired in january. Cspan and if you were to try to define what it takes to get to be a columnist for the New York Times, what would go under that package . Guest well, i certainly think its helpful if you have a good deal of reporting experience and a career in the newspaper business. But mr. Safire proves that thats not necessary because before he came to us, he worked for richard nixon. I think the most important thing a columnist really needs is a clear voice, an identifiable way of speaking to the readers and looking at the world and a real ability not necessarily to take lemons and make lemonade, but sometimes to take a little bit of string from here and a little bit of string from there and to weave them all together into whole cloth. Its quite a different skill than being a really good reporter or a really good writer, because of the selfstarting aspect of it. I mean, no one calls you on a monday morning and says, for wednesday, do a column about this. And for sunday, do a column about that. It all has to come from whatever motivates you. Cspan who do you talk to when you want to talk to somebody about ideas . Guest oh, i talk to my friends a lot. I have a lot of friends who are in the business who are reporters and i tend to talk to them almost every morning about whats going on in the news, about things that weve heard and read, that kind of thing. And i am forever picking the brain the brains of our reporters who are absolutely great about it. You know, i mean, if i want to write something about the Supreme Court selection process, i get Linda Greenhouse on the phone so fast because she knows so much and shes so smart about the issues surrounding her beat that i could never go wrong. You know, if i want to write about the homeless or Child Welfare policy in new york city, i call celia dugger who covers that for us and she has a million different contacts right on the tips of her fingers. So, i mean, given how good our staff is, theres 100 terrific brains to pick. Cspan is there somebody, either a friend or somebody you work with, that always calls you the day that a column hits the street and reacts to what youve written . Guest yeah. My best friend will do that, and my husband does that most of the time. Maybe not first thing in the morning, because he knows im a little fragile sometimes first thing in the morning. Cspan now what does that word mean . Guest well, after having written all day tuesday and gotten into a lather about something, im usually a little still headup about the subject. And i dont want to hear about what i did wrong with it, if i did, so that its usually over dinner on wednesday night that jerry will say, you know, you made a good point in that column about clinton, but i dont think you took into account x, y or z. I may still get sort of, you know, chinup about that, but i hear it more at dinnertime than i do in the morning. But my best friend, janet maslin, whos film critic at the New York Times, is somebody who weighs in with me practically every time i write in fact, practically every morning. Cspan now what do they say to you that is the most helpful . And when do you know that you really hit it and when do you know that youve missed it . Guest because when ive really hit it, they say, boy, did you hit it on that column. I mean, my husband will say to me, boy, good column today. You know, and hes sparing enough with that. Hes a harsh enough judge that i know that i really hit it when he says that. And i dont know as often when ive missed it, except that sometimes therell be a somewhat deafening silence about the larger point of the column. Sometimes someone will say to me, gee, you know, that was a good analogy that you used. And then i think, but what about the whole thing . But oftentimes, if ive missed it, i know ive missed it. And then in a couple of days, the readers tell you. I mean, if youve written something thats particularly effective, even given the fact that you hear much more often about people who dont like the column than people who like it if youve really hit it out of the park, the readers will write in to you and say, boy, you know, i really like your column, but that one and thats a wonderful feeling. Cspan what do you notice happening to you. Are you three years plus into this column. Guest yes. Cspan . A Little Television exposure, primetime live and all that. People want you to come speak to them . Guest yeah, i give usually one or two speeches a month. But i like that as much for what i learn as i do for me giving a speech, because, you know, in terms of the questions that get asked or the things that people come up to me and say afterwards, you can get a real good sense of what america is thinking. When the campaign was going on and i was out giving speeches, a lot of times, you know, i got as good material from the audience in terms of future columns as they ever got from me. Cspan where do you think you get the whats the best source for you on columns . Guest page one of the newspaper, a lot of times. I mean, a lot of times you just write off the news because whats happening is the only game in town. I mean, therell come a day in the next couple of weeks, months, whatever, when therell be some sort of decision about gays in the military. And for at least a couple of days, all anybody will be talking about is that decision. Actually, you know, for the last several months, you could have written about that at any time because its so much in the air during Something Like the anita hill testimony before the judiciary committee, you couldnt not write about that story. It was all anybody was thinking about. So frequently, you get it from the news, but some of it is learning how to read the news and how to bring together disparate parts. I mean, recently i wrote about the Lakewood High School spur posse, the guys who were keeping track of how many girls in their school theyd gone to bed with as a measure of sort of their gang worth. And it seemed obvious to me to put that together with a case in glen ridge, new jersey, of the High School Athletes who were convicted of having sexually assaulted a neighborhood retarded girl. So that sometimes something will seem like a good idea for a column, but it gets to be a much better idea if after a week or two theres two or three other things that can make the same point in tandem with that. Cspan did you believe everything that anita hill said . Guest i believed most of what anita hill said, yes. Cspan most . What didnt you believe . Guest sometimes i thought that she might be confused about times and dates, about what shed said to people, when; which i think is perfectly natural, given the amount of time that had elapsed between the events and the time that she was testifying and the enormous stress she was under. But i found the central accusations that she leveled against him rather credible. Its not an exact science. I mean, thats sometimes people say to me, how did you know . I guess i knew in the same way that sitting in the jury room or sitting in a courtroom, hearing two wildly different versions of the same acts, you decide that one person is telling the truth and the other person isnt for some reason. Cspan did you believe anything that Clarence Thomas said . Guest oh, i believed a lot that Clarence Thomas said but not about his relationship with anita hill particularly, although i think that he certainly may have thought that their relationship was considerably different than she did. I mean, its not uncommon for people who get into this kind of situation to see it very differently, depending on whos in the power position, whos not, whos saying what to who. Cspan on the back of your book, Alice Hoffman says, Anna Quindlen is a National Treasure. Did you pick that . Guest no, i didnt. I mean, i thought it was terribly nice of Alice Hoffman to say it, but ive taken a lot of ribbing about being a National Treasure. And, i. Cspan who is she . Guest shes a novelist who writes just wonderful, wonderful books. Cspan why have you taken a lot of ribbing . Guest well, you know, my husband will say to me oh, hows the National Treasure this morning . Things like that. It makes you feel sort of foolish. Cspan new York Magazine says youre the laureate of real life. Guest yeah . Cspan you like that one . Guest i mean, its sort of strange to have people see you in that way, particularly if youve spent your whole life being the reporter who sees things written like that about other people and either gives them credence or dismisses them. I continue to be very uncomfortable on the wrong side of the notebook. Cspan your own newspaper is quoted as saying, Anna Quindlens column has been a twice weekly argument that public issues have an impact, both philosophical and visceral, on individual citizens. Guest well, you know, i really like that description. That was a description they wrote when i won the pulitzer last year. And i thought that was a pretty nice way of describing what i try to do in the column and what i do when im at my best. Cspan whos susan isaacs . Guest shes a fiction writer, novelist. Cspan she says what a writer. guest what a writer. Thats a nice feeling. Its a nice feeling to think that, you know, people think youre doing it well, because 95 percent of your life is spent in front of this computer screen thinking, is anyone reading this stuff . You know . So. Cspan how do you know when someones reading it . Guest the volume of mail often tells you whats. Cspan whats the biggest volume youve ever gotten . Guest i think during the anita hill testimony, we got a huge volume of mail. But there are certain issues that will set certain people off. I still always get a lot of mail on abortion and i get a lot of mail on gay rights. Cspan can you ever think of a column you wrote that you were excited about that just landed like a big thud . Guest oh, yeah. There are columns that ive just really been very pleased with and maybe we got, like, two or three letters from somebody saying they were good. But you know, its funny, the columns that i can think of that i felt that way about, when i went back and reread them, i still felt that way about. The first column in this book is called the old block, and its about going back to my the house where my father grew up in in west philadelphia, which is a very impoverished and battered neighborhood now. And going to see it, its all burnt out and boarded up now, the little house where he and his brothers and sisters grew up. And i loved that column. I just felt like, you know i really hit it right on the writing. And nobody else much seemed to care, but i still liked it. Cspan what kind of schools do you have your kids in . Guest my kids go to private school in new york city. Cspan and why do you have them in private instead of public . Guest the Public Schools where we live we didnt think were as good as they could be, and the private schools that we looked at in new york were so wonderful that we didnt hesitate for a moment. Im largely the product of private schools, and so unlike all my friends who like to say, i went to Public School and i want my kid to go to Public School, i really feel like i did very, very well in private schools and that they were then what they tend to be now, which is consumer responsive. The parents can effect change and have the school mirror their hopes and dreams for their kids education. The problem is that, of course, our Public Schools ought to be consumer responsive, too, and too often theyre not. But we just wanted what we thought was the best school for our kids and it happened to be a private school. Cspan whats the liberal position then on things like choice and the Public Schools . Guest School Choice . Cspan mmhmm. Guest i think School Choice is sort of a scam, to be perfectly honest with you, because the people who know how to play the system, overwhelmingly the middle class, will know how to play the system in terms of finding the right school and getting their kids where its best for them. And the people who always get left out in the cold, in my opinion the poor are going to still be left out in the cold. Their neighborhood schools arent going to get any better because maybe people will say, well, you know, nobody chose that one. And meantime, schools that are magnet schools or that are in more welltodo neighborhoods that people pick out for their children are going to, i think, thrive because youre going to have parents who are highly motivated who send their kids there. So i think there ought to be a choice. Every parent ought to push for a choice for a school in their neighborhood thats a fine school for their kids. And i think we got to start with the schools in poor neighborhoods which are letting so many kids down. Cspan how old were you when you first started writing a column i mean, for this column . Guest this column . Cspan yes. Guest i was 37. Cspan is that the youngest person whos ever started writing a column for. Guest russell started Russell Baker started when he was 37, too, and weve never quite bothered to figure out which one of us was youngest at the time. Makes me feel like im in excellent company. Cspan can you see yourself still writing a column 30 years from now . Guest no. Cspan why . Guest . I cant. In my case, i dont think it would serve me or serve the reader. I feel like sometimes, columnists outstay their welcome, and that i want to be as fresh and as passionate and as on top of my form when i write my last column as i was when i wrote my first one. So i cant imagine that i can last that long. Cspan what else do you want to do in this profession . Guest i dont know the answer to that. I mean, i love writing fiction. I love writing novels and i could see doing that fulltime, but, boy, newspapers have always made my heart go thump, thump, thump, and its hard to think about giving them up. So i cant really answer. I cant go back to being a street reporter, because it would be real hard to ask the readers to accept me as a third person objective again on a whole variety of stories and issues. But i dont really know what comes next for me. Cspan your kids getting trained in reading a newspaper . Guest yeah, my kids are pretty good about that, actually. Although my oldest has developed a certain reputation in current events. They have to take out a story every week and tell the whole class about it. And last week on grandparents day, all the grandparents were treated to an explication by my eldest son of marla maples pregnancy, which the teacher thought was perfectly all of one piece with his previous performances, which have included two stories about amy fisher, so i have a feeling that if he winds up in my business, hes going to wind up on a tabloid paper. Cspan now you havent had any influence at all on him, have you, on this kind of stuff . Guest i dont know about on that. Ive had considerable influence on him, but i would have urged him to pick something a bit more newsy. Cspan you write a column in here about lee atwater and robert mcnamara. Guest right. Cspan why . Guest oh, boy. I just was so struck by two pieces that came out at the same time. There was a piece about atwater in life magazine when he was sick, maybe six months before he died. The pictures were dreadful to look at because from the therapy for his brain tumor, he was so bloated. He wasnt even recognizable. And in the course of the piece, he expressed really profound regret about some of the tactics that hed used to get candidates elected. He talked about how he wanted to apologize to michael dukakis. And he said that sometimes when his little daughters wanted to get his attention, theyd pretend to be interviewing him for television. I think that same week that i saw that, Time Magazine had an interview with mcnamara who expressed profound regret about the course of the vietnam war and also said when he was asked, who really knew him . That he couldnt really answer that question and that he couldnt say that his children did and that that was a hard thing to have to admit. It was a combination of the deep regrets about personal decisions that had irrevocably shaped Public Policy in this country, and the sense on the part of both of those men that they had somehow missed out with their own children; that seemed to me to be so compelling and to Say Something about how macho can leave you cold and lonely after your days of power and influence are done. Cspan when you look ahead, what do you see in this country . Guest oh, gosh, thats a tough question. Im always amazed at the ability of americans to bounce back from almost anything, and on the microlevel, to do the right thing. You know, so often we look at the macrolevel at which people are calling in, saying, you know, that gay people shouldnt be allowed in the military, they should be taken out and shot or that a you know, ahillary ought to get back in the kitchen, although, in fact, the polls are showing great approval for mrs. Clintons performance, and i feel that way about it how shes done, but on a microlevel, in their own communities, you see how people take care of each other and worry about each other. And when i travel around america, i always come back home optimistic about the future because i feel that so many of the people i meet are basically good at heart and still really want to hang a welcome sign out in this country despite all the things we hear to the contrary. Cspan is this country better or worse than it was when you got to new york in 1970 . Guest in some ways, its much, much worse for people who live in the cities, for the poor, for people trying to make due on just one income, for people who want upward mobility for their children, which really seems like an impossibility. But i got to the city in 1970, and overall, since then, things have become much, much better for women a profound change in a lot of ways that has directly affected the course of my life. I mean, so many of the things that we were arguing about as possible for women then, in a way that made us seem like crazed radicals, are now taken for granted in america today; that theres nothing strange about a woman in the pulpit; theres nothing strange about a woman in the precinct house; that theres nothing strange about a little girl pitching in little league; that theres nothing strange about women in the senate and hopefully that theres going to be more and more of them all the time. So things have changed greatly for the better for women in this country. But some things in this country are clearly much, much tougher than they were 20some years ago. Cspan in your lifetime, will you ever see a woman editor of the New York Times . Guest executive editor . The whole schmear . Cspan yes. Guest maybe. Cspan whats it going to take . Guest the right woman. Cspan is there one there at the paper now . Guest im not entirely sure of that. I certainly think theres any number of people i know who would be good candidates and who are certainly as good as the male candidates. But its always an odd combination of being in the right place at the right time, whenever the right time happens to be and being the right person for the job. I mean, i always think at any given time, theres maybe half a dozen people who could run the New York Times well. It depends on what the paper needs at any particular point in time. But i certainly think its coming soon. I dont know how soon. Cspan in the event that somebodys watching this is saying, whats the big deal about having a column in the New York Times . They dont live in new york; they dont read it. What would you tell them . Guest well, that millions of people read you every time you appear; that some of them are people who are in a position to change some of the injustices that youre writing about; that some of them are people who are in a position to give money to some of the good causes that you write about; and that maybe you can affect the National Discourse by changing or just moving a little bit along the way we talk about certain key issues. Cspan anybody important ever call you on the phone after one of these columns comes out . Guest oh, members of the senate will call me from time to time because the column is about something that theyre keenly interested in, writers and foundation heads, people like that lots of those people will write to me. I remember one day my assistant called me and she was very, very excited and she said, paul simon wrote you a letter. Paul simon really liked your column today. And i said, oh, thats great. And we hung up and then i called her back and said, the singer or the senator . It was the senator. Cspan at the very end of your book in one of these columns, you write that, she gave me my anger back. Whos the she . Guest my daughter. Its a column i wrote from marias second birthday. Cspan why did you want your anger back . Guest because i think when you First Experience sex discrimination and when you first understand that, in many ways, things are tougher in the world for women than for many men, you learn how to deal i mean, either that or you can walk around incredibly angry and and not particularly useful all the time. And so i got used to some of the way things was. Its the equivalent in the office of picking your fights in terms of somebody who might make an inappropriate remark or Say Something sexist. But once i had this little girl who was incredibly feisty and incredibly strong willed and incredibly smart, i just thought, i cannot pass along to her exactly the same world that i got and say to her, oh, you know you know, these bad things you know, date rape and Sexual Harassment and the glass ceiling, dont worry. Youll get used to them as time goes by. I mean, i just love her so much and i want her to have so many good opportunities open for her that that all over again, i looked at the world and said, you cant do this to my daughter. Cspan how old is she . Guest shes four now. Cspan hows she doing . Guest ill tell you, she could either, you know, manage the yankees or run the white house or shes just an incredibly strong willed and feisty little girl. And i have a lot of admiration for her. And i want to do my best to see that she hangs on to that sense that shes a pretty important person. Cspan does she read your column . Guest no, she cant read yet. But shes in the stage where she pretends to be able to read cspan this is what the cover of the book looks like, its a group of columns written by Anna Quindlen and the title of the book is, thinking out loud. Thank you very much for joining us. Guest thank you. That all happens next on cspan2s booktv. Professor robin west, author of teaching law, talked to booktv about the robs facing law schools the problems facing law schools today including high costs, outdated curriculum and the lack of Job Opportunities upon graduation. She was interviewed as