SPEAKER_00 0:14

Welcome to the Pan Am Podcast, brought to you by the Pan Am Museum in Garden City, New York. This podcast and our museum are dedicated to celebrating the legacy of the world's most iconic airline, Pan American World Airways. My name is Tom Betty, and I'm the host of this program. Thank you for joining us. This program is sponsored by the generous support of Mr. Adam Aaron, the CEO of AMC Entertainment Holdings, Incorporated. The Pan Am Museum Foundation is a nonprofit organization. Please visit our website for more information at the Panamuseum.org. Again, our website is thePanamuseum.org. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. If you are using Apple Podcasts, please consider leaving a review. It will help others discover this program. If you're not familiar with Pan Am, welcome. We are honored to have you here, and for you to learn about what we're all about. If you already know of Pan Am, worked for, or flown on the airline, or just love our history, it's good to be with you again. So with that, let's get this episode in the air, so to speak. Welcome aboard your Pan American jet clipper. But first, this is an indirect follow-up to episode 21, where we explored Pan Am's historic supporting role with presidential travel and White House press charters. In that episode, we were joined by Dwight Chapin, a trusted aide to President Richard M. Nixon and Pan Am veterans, flight attendant Claire Graham, and Captain John Marshall. Mr. Donaldson was a frequent passenger on Pan Am's White House press charters during the Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations. If you haven't already, after listening to this installment, we urge you to take a listen to episode 21 titled White House Press Charters and Flying with Air Force One. On the evening of December 4th, 1991, the sad day of Pan Am ceasing operations, Dan Rather was at the CBS anchor desk, Tom Brocaw was over at NBC, and Sam Donaldson was at the anchor desk of ABC News. Coincidentally, that was also the day the government started using a new tool to measure the economy, called the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, as it is more commonly referred to today, and is still in use. Let's take a quick listen to that two-minute clip from ABC News on December 4, 1991.

SPEAKER_11 3:32

President Bush sounded a new, more pessimistic tone on the economy today. Instead of talking up how the recovery is starting to take hold, Mr. Bush said the U.S. faces tough times. That assessment comes on a day when one of the most visible symbols of America's past dominance in the field of aviation shut down. Pan American World Airways has stopped flying. Here's ABC's Stephen Og.

SPEAKER_10 3:56

One of the last flights Pan Am flew today from Washington to New York flew home empty. The end for the airline that pioneered international aviation left many passengers stranded. And employees dismayed. Pan America Road Airways is wonderful, wonderful airline. Pan Am had been in bankruptcy since last January after losing money for years. It finally collapsed after Delta Airlines backed out of a deal to give Pan Am money, which would have kept it flying.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

The losses were too big, the economy wasn't strong enough. And at some point you have to call a halt to it and say, wait a minute, I'm not going to throw good money after bad.

SPEAKER_10 4:39

And there's no evidence that the economy that helped bring down Pan Am is getting much healthier. As the Federal Reserve Board met in Washington today, members had before them the latest survey of Federal Reserve banks, which said the economic recovery was slowing down. In fact, the government released a new figure today called the Gross Domestic Product, the sum total of all the goods and services produced in the United States. It grew at a 1.7% annual rate during the summer, somewhat slower than earlier estimates.

SPEAKER_03 5:08

It's not a rapid recovery. It's a uh a slow-paced recovery. We expect to see it picking up uh next year.

SPEAKER_10 5:17

The new measure no longer includes profits American companies earn overseas. So most economists say it better reflects the true state of the domestic economy. One result: the new figures show the recession was deeper than first reported, but the recovery remains weak. Stephen Og, ABC News, Washington.

SPEAKER_11 5:36

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrials lost more than 17 points today to close at 29-11.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Samuel Andrew Donaldson Jr. was born on March 11, 1934, and grew up on the family farm in Shaberino, New Mexico. In October 1967, he joined ABC News as a Washington correspondent and covered the Republican and Democratic political conventions in 1968. He also began anchoring the network's 11 p.m. Saturday and Sunday newscast the following year and would later cover the Vietnam War for ABC News throughout 1971. During 1973 and 1974, Mr. Donaldson was assigned ABC's Chief Watergate correspondent and covered the trial of the Watergate burglars, the Senate Watergate hearings, and the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment investigation of President Nixon. During the presidential election of 1976 between President Ford and Governor Carter, he was assigned to be ABC's correspondent covering the Carter campaign. Following the election, he was assigned the coveted White House correspondent assignment for ABC News, a post he would hold for the duration of the Carter and Reagan administrations. He would later return as ABC's White House correspondent for much of the Clinton administration in the 1990s. Sam Donaldson's career is nothing but exceptional. He's interviewed just about everyone in Washington and beyond, from presidents, elected officials, foreign leaders, and celebrities, to just give a few examples. In 1994, his reporting on Eric Pripke, a former Nazi SS officer, set off a chain of events that ended with Pripka being arrested and convicted for war crimes and imprisoned until his death. There is a link in the episode description to watch this historic segment of ABC's Primetime Live. In 1995, Sam was diagnosed with cancer and shared his story with the public during several broadcasts to raise awareness. With the exception of the Republican Convention in 1992, Sam Donaldson covered every major political party convention from 1964 to 2008 until he retired from ABC in 2009. Among his many awards are four Emmys, three Peabodies, and the Edward R. Morrow Award in 1997, as well as the Paul White Award. The Pan Am Museum Foundation wishes Sam a happy 89th birthday on March 11, 2023. Before our interview with Sam Donaldson, we wanted to share a quick three-minute tribute clip from the National Press Foundation when he was named Broadcaster of the Year in 1997.

SPEAKER_11 8:56

I'm Sam Donaldson. Yes. This is World News. President, I've listened to what you've had to say tonight. What about my question? What went wrong? If you don't want to answer my question, I understand what then I'd try another one. Did you specifically ask any of the leaders? You said you asked. I didn't say that. What did you say? I've never said it in public.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

The question is not.

SPEAKER_11 10:02

I guess to ask the question, you're right. You get to give whatever answer you want. This week, with Jam Bobson and Coffee Roberts, if you want to play Washington, get a dog. And going live without his cooking moment, deciding that it's not even spiritual. How does the wrap in the woman? Do you have anything to hide up together? Mr. Captain Nazi yesterday. You were just following orders. Be sure to join us again next Wednesday evening for another edition of Primetime Live. This is what I was treated. I have melanoma. From the very outset, I knew I was going to tell people. I knew I couldn't hide it. I didn't want to hide it. I thought it would be two or three months.

SPEAKER_10 11:22

I think the chances that it won't come back a little better than 50-50. Okay.

SPEAKER_11 11:28

Going to go to the White House. Nice to have you back on the beat again, Sam Donaldson. Mr. President erect! What I was surprised about was that he didn't even bat an eye. Thank you. It was just straight ahead as if we and the press corps weren't there. Well, we are Senator French, Senator, you won't get tobacco legislation because it's your fault.

SPEAKER_04 12:00

And all the people from Washington started smiling when Sam asked the question. You should understand that proves that this is a truly important event.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

It is my great pleasure to introduce and welcome Mr. Sam Donaldson to the Pan Am Podcast.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

Well, Tom, I'm pleased to be with you, but please call me Sam.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

I I will try. I don't know if I could do that. Uh as a historian, I am just pinching myself that I'm I'm speaking to you, and I I want to thank you very much for your time.

SPEAKER_02 12:34

Well, I have a line that others are who try to compliment me in that way. And the line is, Tom, you're clearly most easily pleased.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

So let's start with your early life. Where did you grow up and why did you choose journalism?

SPEAKER_02 12:50

Well, I was born in uh in southern New Mexico. Uh uh I lived in a cotton farm. Actually, I was born in El Paso, Texas, because my mother, who was a widow woman for that time, my father having suffered his final heart attack, thought the nearest hospital was in El Paso, Texas, twenty-five miles away, right across the line. And so she went there. So I'm officially a Texan from birth, but I was brought home to New Mexico after two days. I consider myself a native New Mexican. And after the cotton farm and going to schools in El Paso, again, the nearest town of any sorts with an education system that my mother thought was better than the little school across the road from the family farm. And I went to New Mexico Military Institute, went to a small college in El Paso, then called Texas Western. Uh now it's called the University of Texas at El Paso. I went to the army, spent thirty months on active duty in artillery, and uh when I got out of that, I was learning toward my late twenties what to do. Well, I admire kids today who for one reason or other early on decide they'd like to pursue a particular craft or career or or occupation and they worked hard to learn that and and do their best at that. But I was just kind of wandering around. I'd done radio broadcasts of as a disc jockey in El Paso while I was going to college. And I knew something about communication. But uh I'm one of those people who just sort of fell into a uh a business which I then came to love and pursued uh for 52 years in Washington DC before retirement the news business as a reporter, anchor, a person in that field, and I was just very lucky to have found it.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

So you flew the world on assignment with Pan Am, and you were the White House correspondent for many years. So you traveled with the White House press charters on a Pan Am plane that followed Air Force One. Do you have any particular stories about flying on Pan Am that you wanted to share with us?

SPEAKER_02 15:06

Well, of course, as the history shows, one trip, the man who really took a little airline and began it called a Pan Am. First flight, as I recall, was from Key West, Florida, Havana, Cuba. He developed this large idea of people uh around the world. Because in those days, of course, it was a novelty and it wasn't thought to maybe to amount to much. We had airplanes and the automobile industry was growing. But Pan Am, along with the other great airlines that soon were found, Eddie Rickenbacker, our our ace in World War One, Eastern Airlines, and Robert Sek, who bought an airline and called it Continental, and there were many others. Uh, those were the days. And so you want by recalling Pan Am. Well, it was a favorite, of course. If you could get a seat on Pan Am, and you could in those days, seats were available and you could also do it for a price that you could afford or your company could afford if it was sending you someplace. And as the White House correspondent, that was my privilege to not have to pay for it. ABC News would pay for it in Washington, and you take a Pan Am plane to Europe, uh, you could take it to Asia, and it was first class uh seating. And here's another thing about Juan Trip, maybe people don't understand. He not only formed the Scrait Airline, but he was the first person to say, Let's have uh a different class, a coach class, if you will. Because before that it was just one fare and you paid the fare. Now, if you wanted to pay uh the fare for a seat up front, you could do that. But he sliced the fares for people so they could ride the same plane to the same destination in comfort, and in the coach session, hot meals served. You can't get a potato chip today. But Pan Am was the was the epitome of air travel for America. And the fact that it and the other great airlines, I've talked about a few of them, Continental and Eastern, TWA, they're all gone. We have air travel today, but it's certainly different.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

Indeed. And we'll get into some deregulation conversation in a moment, but I really want to hone in on your journalism career. 52 years covering, I can't even count all the presidents, uh, back to President Kennedy. Can you talk about what it was like to move to Washington, D.C. as a journalist and start covering the Kennedy administration in 1961?

SPEAKER_02 17:41

I I've got a job at the local CBS station, then owned by the Washington Post in Washington. I'm very lucky to do it. Uh and uh if there were 5,000 reporters in Washington at that time, I was the 5,000th and first. I mean, talk about being on the edge in the fringe. But it was a it was for me a candy store of opportunity uh to meet the people that I watched on television somewhat and heard on the radio, the politicians, the important people uh in the government of our country and to see them in action. I, for instance, early on began to cover the Congress from time to time. Even though it was a local station, they would send me down to the Senate. I watched the great civil rights debate of nineteen sixty-four. I was there the day that Southern filibuster to stop that bill which eliminated formal segregation, legal segregation, finally passed. Uh and I saw the two parties, for instance, working together. And it was unique in those days. I know you've heard this story before. Republicans and the Democrats often have different views on the same issues because they represented different sections of our country. The Republicans generally represented the people who created the jobs because they had the wealth. And the Democrats generally represented people who worked for the people who created the jobs and they made the they made the money. Henry Ford was a wealthy Republican and his motor company was successful. The people who worked for him on the assembly line finally became successful from the standpoint of being able to compete because of unions and because of their jobs. So I watched these people contend in the Senate and in the House. And they made deals, and they made deals that were open and across the line, and they made a deal so that a bill would pass like Medicare. Republicans didn't think it was the right way to go. The Democrats thought it was. That's what it is, that supports people in this country on taxpayer money. At the end, though, when the Republicans had lost the fight and the bill was passed on final passage, almost half the Republicans who opposed the concept voted for it. That's the way it worked in those days. Not today. But those were some of my memories from the standpoint of covering Washington and covering presidents. Yes, I met John Kennedy. When I say I met him, I have to be truthful. We had a very short and quick conversation as he was leaving the Rose Garden after some ceremony like Teacher of the Year. That was the only time I ever spoke to him, or he spoke to me. I attended some of his news conferences as a young reporter on the edge of the crowd. I never had the courage to ask him or try to ask him a question. But after that, I found some courage, and every other president since up until my retirement, I was able to question either as a White House correspondent or as a political reporter in Washington without any fear that uh the question couldn't be asked.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

And let me ask you this question. Actually, it's a three-part question. Who is your favorite uh president from a personal standpoint, because you've had personal relationships with many of them, with respect to being a professional journalist? And lastly, in the sense of historical perspective.

SPEAKER_02 21:06

Well, let me start by saying when I came to Washington, I soon noticed that the important reporters, uh, columnists particularly in town, wanted to be personal friends in society with the people they covered. I mean, uh John Kennedy had a number of those people. The managing editor of the Washington Post, who I just thought was a great guy in every other respect, wanted desperately to be with his friend uh John Kennedy. Today, though, after many of us growing up in that era watched uh lies from President Johnson about the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon about Watergate decided, well, wait a moment, we could like or dislike certain politicians, we all have our personal views. But let's separate this idea that we're gonna be a personal friend of theirs. Because when they get in trouble How do you say to your friend, well, I've got to cover you and listen, there's evidence here that you may have done something illegal. And the friend says, Well, how dare you? And my friend, you can't do that. So we didn't do that. However, if you ask me about my favorite presidents, generally I liked most of them, and even though I fight personally as a voter, disagree with many of their policies, or at least a few of them, as long as I thought they were not on the take and they were not creating criminal acts and they had the best interest within the perimeters of American society in those days for the entire country and American people, I thought they were okay. But the one president, of course, because I covered him as a White House correspondent, that uh I was most taken with was Ronald Reagan. Now, some of the kids today who weren't born when he was president uh don't know much about him or any of the other presidents. I covered Jimmy Carter, liked him very much. And I talked again to every president, beginning with John Kennedy. But Reagan was a powerful force. Yes, he was an actor, and frankly, that's one of the reasons he was powerful. He was a great communicator. We like people who are not dull. We like people who are interesting, we like people who uh have something that catches our eye. Uh we don't like people from the standpoint of a political sense who are brilliant, perhaps, a brilliant scientist, for instance, someone who I mean, I was told once that never met Albert Einstein, that I was told that this brilliant man, this brilliant scientist, was one of the last people you would invite to dinner just to have an interesting, great conversation with your friends. Because unless he was X equals Y to the highest power, he was didn't have anything to say. So Ronald Reagan was a man who had a lot to say. Ronald Reagan was someone who captured the country's attention at a time when we were in a very deep recession trying to ring out inflation. Does the word inflation win the bell? Well, it did in 1979, 1981, and two, and Reagan was the president. But under Reagan, not only his policies, but the Federal Reserve Board, which had rung out inflation the tough way by raising interest rates too. How about paying 20%? You want to pay 20% on your mortgage or your car? Ah, I saw it. The people alive in those days who had to buy something or do business also saw it. But Reagan presided over then a period of better times. And there was morning in America again when he was re-elected. And he was an interesting person. I think Reagan had its twin personality in the sense that he had a political ideology, which he believed in and required that he pursue. But he had a personal feeling toward people which often warred with his political ideology. For instance, one year, his budget, which most presidents, with the exception of Bill Clinton, perhaps, knew very little about any of the details, just the broad sense. His budget called for cutting out just a few hundred thousand dollars of federal money for a new department at the Center for Control of Disease that had a little division that would put organ donors with people who needed organ transplants together. And yet when he read in the paper, roughly the same time, that some kid in the Midwest needed a liver transplant, but they didn't have enough money to pay for it, he sent his personal check of $1,000 to the kid. Now you say that was a White House ploy just to get publicity as a humanitarian. I don't think it was. I knew Reagan well enough to, it was the family that, not the White House, that publicized the check. So here he was. He didn't know he was cutting out money to do exactly what he saw the need for when he could see someone personally. So I used to say that, and I made this little story up, that if you got down on your luck and somehow got through the Secret Service around the Oval Office and got into the Oval Office, said, Mr. President, I'm down on my luck, I've lost my job, I've got four kids, we're all hungry, I don't know what to do. He would take the shirt off his back to give to you because he felt for you. On the other hand, then when you left, he'd sit with his underwear and he'd signed legislation throwing your parents off Social Security, people on welfare, cutting them way down because they were shipless bums who weren't working. I mean, he had this dichotomy of views. He cared about people, but some of his policies, particularly toward women, uh, were not ones that had won the approval of a large number of Americans. And of course, during the Cold War, he started as the great Cold War warrior, an anti-communist that we all knew about. In his first news conference, he called on me and I said, Well, Mr. President, knowing his views, we all knew his views, but now he was president, had to get on the record. Mr. President, you think the Soviet Union is interested in détente, you know, peaceful coexistence, or by some other means, world domination. And out it comes. He says, Well, they lie, they cheat, they steal, they will commit any crime to further a goal of world domination. Wow, thank you for your view. But toward the end of his time with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, they helped make the peace, they helped do things which eventually destroyed the Soviet communist state. Reagan managed to achieve that without war. So, in sum, he was a great force. I disagreed with many of his policies, but as a reporter, my job was not to express my personal disagreement when I would do a report for the White House, but try to get it right from the standpoint of who said what, what was being done, and what they were saying about their future plans.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

So, with respect to you being a professional journalist, what president did you admire? Is that Reagan again?

SPEAKER_02 28:26

Well, again, as a journalist, I personally admired some presidents more than others. But with the two exceptions, one uh toward the beginning of my career, really, and one at the end, I thought the person, so far man, someday it'll be a woman. And watch out, guys. When it is, you may never get it back. With a few exceptions, I thought they all meant to do well by the country. Now, some of them had better ideas and better plans and ran a better administration and made better decisions along the way, of course. But they all, when they ran for the presidency, the ones that succeeded at all were ones who wanted to do something right for the country, not just say, ah, I'm the president of the United States, I'm the most important person in the world, let me pat myself on the back. Those people almost never succeeded. Those people almost never got the nomination. Or if they got the nomination, they don't, they didn't win the election. But as far as admiring them personally, John Kennedy from my administration, we were all young in those days, uh, and the way he was killed made him just an idol. When I was growing up in Washington as a reporter, I admired John Kennedy and the Kennedy family and all of that. I didn't know about some of his feet of clay. I didn't know about some of the things he did that were not public knowledge, at least not to me. Some reporters knew about them, his uh pension for women, other than his wife being one of those points. I admired Lindsay Johnson. He was the best civil rights president we've had since Abraham Lincoln, including Barack Obama. And had he been able to pursue his great society program to eliminate poverty, not just for whites, but for all people in the United States, he would have gone down in history, perhaps as our greatest recent president, certainly. But the war in Vietnam brought him low. He pursued a policy that he knew was wrong, but he didn't know how to get out of it. Because the country, when it began under him, that is, our U.S. involvement with troops, wanted to beat those dirty commies wherever they found them, wherever they were, not understanding that communism is a failed system as far as people living under it, and it will fall of its own weight wherever it is still today, eventually in China. I'm convinced freedom is the system that works, democracy is a system that works for people. And Johnson knew that to an extent. But the American people, when we sent in troops then, when he sent in troops to try to save South Vietnam from North Vietnam's desire to consolidate the country, he didn't know how to stop it. Nixon lost enemies everywhere, and he tried to forestall what he thought was a conspiracy against him by his political enemies, and he did it in ways that we know are illegal. Gerald Ford held the country together after Nixon had resigned, and I give him great credit for that. He was a decent man, uh, and uh I knew him pretty well. Jimmy Carter, my first president as White House correspondent for ABC News. I thought he was a good man who didn't have a grasp of national politics, and you have to have a grasp of national politics. He was an engineer, he wanted things to work right, he wanted to solve problems, he didn't have a lot of time for small talk. No, if you're going to press the flesh, you have to have a lot of time for small talk with people whose names you don't know, but you certainly learn them immediately and have one of your aides take them down. If they're a supportive of yours, particularly. I could go on about presidents. George Herbert Walker Bush, the first president Bush. He was a good man also. I liked him very much. Some of his policies, again, I disagreed. He had the best foreign policy staff of any president I've known. James A. Baker III, his good friend as Secretary of State. Colin Powell, General Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his national security advisor, also. Great guy. And Dick Cheney was the defense secretary at that moment. Bill Clinton, he was the best from the standpoint of pressing the flesh and getting people who didn't even like him to think, well, hey, this guy's okay. He was an abused child, apparently, and he learned something from that. That is, if you're an abused child, you want affection, you want love. I'm not talking about romantic love now. I'm talking you want to be admired and liked. And you understand the way to do that is to like other people, to admire them, to press the flesh with them and mean it. When I covered him, I'd watch him go into a room of people, many of whom didn't like him and hadn't voted for him. And when he left, after about an hour of walking around talking to people, almost unanimously they'd all say, Wait, hey, I like that guy. And I still don't like his policy here. I may not vote for a re-election, but I'm a good guy. And the second Bush, he was a mistake from the standpoint of the family. When his father was defeated by Clinton, the family, the boys, Jeb and uh George W said, well, we'll get revenge here. They both ran for governor of two states. Bush won in Texas, that's George W. And Jeb Bush lost in Florida because Jeb was the one who was supposed to be the guy to get the next nomination for president. No, it became his brother. And his brother's a nice guy, and you know, fun at a party, and I don't think he has a mean bone in his body. He didn't really, he wasn't gonna be president, but he was, and uh, he was misled by a group of people who got into Iraq, helped destabilize the Middle East, not save, not save Israel's people who wanted to make that invasion thought was necessary. And from then on, I met Barack Obama, but did not really cover him. And uh become to Donald J. Trump. I've known that uh individual for 40 years. As a reporter, I once and as an anchor of a program called Primetime Live with Diane Sawyer. I interviewed him at length about his business, which was failing in those days. And if you watch that interview today, and I think you might find it online, I don't know. Uh you see the same guy. He looked, we were both younger, he looked better. He could finish the sentence without wandering off into some irrelevancy. He didn't use vulgarity, although during the interview he called me rude, ignorant, and out to get him. Well, I didn't mean to be rude, but you had to interrupt him, or he'd just go on and on. Uh and uh ignorant. I said, you it's it said that you borrowed all the money, you can't pay back the money now for your airline, for the Plaza Hotel, for this big casino, Taj Mahal that you built, and you're gonna go under. Well, he said, What do you know about money? If you were smart, you want to see my you're not smart, you want to see my books. Well, I said, send the books, I'll be happy to hire an accounting firm that's uh mutually agreeable, because I don't have the ability to read all of your books. Well, I might do that. I'm still waiting for Mr. Trump's books. Uh that's okay. Uh but I've I've known who he was, and reporters, even though I was in Washington, got covering him, but we knew who he was, and we never conceived. I was one of the last people in the world to think he was going to be the nominee of a great party, great in those days, the Republican Party, and then being elected president. But he was, because I then recognized when it happened, and I looked at my failure to understand what was going to happen. I didn't know the country. I didn't know that there was about one-third of our country that was really in revolt. People were upset, they had grievances, and some of them I think very legitimate, they'd lost their jobs, they didn't needed some help, and others, in my view, not legitimate. And you had those kinds of grievances, but you couldn't really do anything about them because they understood that society would not countenance that. But when Mr. Trump came to the office by riding that golden staircase and proclaiming that the Mexicans were sending their rapists to the United States, aha! It's like taking the cork out of a bottle and the bad genies come flowing out of the bottle. He took the cork out. And we're dealing with the results of that today. I think we're going to be okay because I think the majority of Americans, it's like a ship that's in a storm. The ship ballast is correct. Uh it will write itself and come through the storm. And I think we're going to do that.

SPEAKER_00 37:45

I have a broader question for you. You have met some very interesting people, many interesting people, you know, over the 52 years that you've been a journalist. Uh, you've met, you know, normal people all over the country, all over the world. You've met celebrities, you've met heads of state, and so forth. Who is your favorite interview?

SPEAKER_02 38:07

My favorite interview because of the person I interviewed, and because of the Times reflected in the interview, is someone that I will bet almost all of your listeners have never heard of. I met him in 1994 in a little town of Baralochi, Argentina, a thousand miles south of Buenos Aires. In the December of the previous year, the Argentine government of the time decided to come clean about what it had done in World War II. Juan Peron of World War II really sided with the Nazis, with Adolf Hitler, uh, and they, when the war was over, provided refuge in Argentina for many people who were Nazis and who were more criminals, had they been able to be brought to justice, and they fled to Argentina and lived there. So, having opened the records, some of the names were now in the books that I showed our audience in Primetime Live, uh big books of people coming in. Here's the man, he says, an engineer. Well, his name was Adolf Eichmann, and if you consider the doctor, the rather the man who headed the unit to round up Jews as to being an engineer, maybe so, but not really. And then there were others. So we found a man in Barilochi. When I say we, the team. I I personally did the interview, but I had a lot of people helping who did the work. It's the way it always is in television, the front person, if uh you like what you see, hey, you're getting a lot of the credit. If you don't like, you get the you have to take the punishment, but it's okay. So we met him and uh he came out of a school, this man 80 years of age, named Eric Flipke. And uh he had worked in London before World War II in 1939. He knew English. So I asked him, he's 80 years old, he looked like a kindly old grandfather. I said, You would you tell us about what you did in World War II? And he said yes, which surprised me. I expected him to run. Because in World War II, Erik Pripki had been a captain in the SS, which was not the army, uh in Rome. He was the number two Gestapo chief. The night before this happened, Italian partisans, because Italy by this time was out of the war, killed a bunch of German soldiers. And Hitler, enraged, ordered that 10 Italian civilians be rounded up for every German soldier that had been killed and be put to death, be executed. So they rounded up. Filipke rounded up, and his Gestapo chief rounded up, uh, 335 Italian civilians. On short notice, they could only find 80 of them Jewish, but they found them. They took him out to the Argentine caves outside of Rome, and he they shot them, the two of them, and also other Gestapo members, and killed them all. So Pripke, in talking about this, said his orders. He didn't want to do it, but he was ordered to do it. And I, of course, began to argue with him that uh orders another excuse for committing illegal acts, for killing civilians in time of war, always against the Geneva Convention. Well, now he said, but not then. And then you in Vietnam, you did it, you killed civilians. And I had to gulp a little bit and said, but it was not national policy, and we tried to find our men who did that and bring them to justice. And we argued back and forth about this, and then I changed the subject, and I said, Well, uh Tripke, after the Allies pushed you and the German, your fellow Germans, out of uh Rome, the war went on for another year, and you were in northern Italy. Did you not work for uh Part Met 4B of the Gestapo, which was headed by Adolf Eichmann? Well, he denied that. He had sense enough to deny that, but we had papers with his signature on them authorizing the removal of Italian Jews in northern Italy to Auschwitz, some 6,000 of them. But he denied that. And finally he began to realize that maybe it wasn't what he'd been living with impunity under his own name. In fact, at one point he said to me, I used to visit my son in the United States, but now I'm on a watch list and I can't go in. Well, he began to wonder is it a good thing talking to this guy with these cameras rolling? He said, I've got to go. He got in his automobile and he looked up at me and he said, You are not a gentleman, and I lost it. I said, I'm not a gentleman, I'm not a mass murderer. The next uh day, uh, Italy, after we ran this uh interview and this report, demanded his extradition. He was extradited after a period of time, tussled in the Argentine court said Italy has no death sentence for any crime committed at any time under any condition. He was finally awarded a life imprisonment sentence, and he died in 2013 at the age of 100. The good die young. I suppose when maybe the opposite is true. But my favorite interview was with Eric Tripke, a man you've never heard of, but so many people had not heard of him, suffered under him and his. Co-conspirators and the Nazis third right. And interviewed Alvin forget.

SPEAKER_00 44:09

We are going to take a quick break with a suspenseful five-minute clip from the television program Nazi Hunters about this fascinating and important story of Sam's career. You will hear the voices of him, ABC News producer Harry Phillips, and researcher Delila Herbst.

SPEAKER_08 44:28

We weren't ready for the fact that his car was parked outside the school. The attention is ratcheted up. And then at precisely 12.01, he steps out of the school. All the doors fly open and we converge on him, fearful that he's gonna jump into his car and drive away. American television.

SPEAKER_12 45:00

Stan of American television.

SPEAKER_08 45:07

And I'm having a heart attack because I'm thinking, speak English. Please, don't invite him to speak a foreign language.

SPEAKER_06 45:12

Sam Donaldson said Eddie Prip K. And he turned round and smiled.

SPEAKER_02 45:20

Can we talk to you about what you did during World War II?

SPEAKER_07 45:24

I had no idea what he would say. Finally, ABC news actor Sam Donaldson is face to face with fugitive Nazi war criminal Eric Friptock.

SPEAKER_02 45:36

I've interviewed a lot of people who have committed crimes, and uh they usually run when they see someone like me.

SPEAKER_08 45:44

He clearly is not intimidated by us in any way.

SPEAKER_12 45:49

Made no sense. In Rome? Yes, in Rome, yes.

SPEAKER_08 46:01

Yes, I am Eric Pribke. Yes, I was in Rome.

SPEAKER_09 46:04

No, the communists blow up a uh a group of our uh German story.

SPEAKER_08 46:09

Yes.

SPEAKER_09 46:10

For every German study, any time has to die.

SPEAKER_08 46:14

He admitted to just about everything that he did.

SPEAKER_12 46:17

But why did you shoot them if they had not done anything?

SPEAKER_06 46:24

Donaldson is the man who wouldn't leave you a second without asking things. He keeps asking and asking and asking.

SPEAKER_12 46:31

But orders are not an excuse.

SPEAKER_09 46:33

Oh it's that time, aura what's an order, you meant.

SPEAKER_12 46:38

And and he was getting more and more agitated. He said we didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it, but I had to. You were just following orders?

SPEAKER_09 46:44

Yes, of course. But I didn't have anybody.

SPEAKER_02 46:48

He actually denied that he had shot anyone personally. But we had papers from a British prisoner of war camp.

SPEAKER_12 46:56

We admitted shooting two people. We had this confession. You were there when they were shot, the civilians. I'm yes, the first ones yes, I thought. And you carried it out.

SPEAKER_09 47:07

I had to carry it out, yes.

SPEAKER_12 47:09

And civilians died.

SPEAKER_09 47:11

Civilians died, yes.

SPEAKER_08 47:12

When Sam raised the idea that perhaps he was a war criminal, he was indignant.

SPEAKER_09 47:20

You live in this time, but we didn't live in 1933.

SPEAKER_12 47:26

I asked him whether old men should pay for the crimes they commit when they're young.

SPEAKER_09 47:31

You know, that's what a crime.

SPEAKER_12 47:32

That what a civilians in time of war is against all international crimes today, but not at this time.

SPEAKER_08 47:38

I'm sure Delilah was enraged.

SPEAKER_05 47:41

I felt proud because I said at least one. I got one.

SPEAKER_02 47:52

We try to get the facts and all of this, but I did become emotional uh by this time.

SPEAKER_12 47:58

How do you feel about the fact that six million Jews were executed, killed?

SPEAKER_09 48:02

I feel very sorry about it. Very, very sorry. But you did it! Many young men do things when odd men like me know they're very sorry about it.

SPEAKER_12 48:10

And finally, I said to him, many people think you should be executed for your crimes. And at that point, you could see a bell ringing in his head. You know, is this a good idea talking to this idiot?

SPEAKER_09 48:24

You came over me, right? That's not a nice man, I'd use it. You're not a gentleman.

SPEAKER_08 48:31

Then he slams the door and drives away.

SPEAKER_07 48:37

ABC News have captured Nazi war criminals Reinhardt Koch and Eric Krypka on tape. It is a huge story. They can't risk it.

SPEAKER_08 48:49

We knew that we had to get Sam out of town. And so within two hours of the confrontation with Kripka, we called the pilots who were hiding in Barrel Object. By the time Sam got there, they were just about ready to go, and he left very quickly. It's safe to stay within six hours of that encounter. It was better than the best luck I ever could imagine. This is one of those moments where you just say everything went absolutely right. We knew we have a great story. That's all we knew initially.

SPEAKER_12 49:21

Good evening. Tonight we're going to tell the story of how thousands of suspected Nazi war criminals escaped justice.

SPEAKER_02 49:27

When we put this story in the air, what might happen to Eric Flipke? What's going to be the next story?

SPEAKER_07 49:36

The broadcast aired six weeks after the 50th anniversary of the Aryotine cave massacre.

SPEAKER_08 49:44

The reaction in Argentina was an explosion of media. In Italy, the same thing happened because the Italians actually believed that all of the perpetrators of that massacre in Rome in 1944 were either dead or had been convicted.

SPEAKER_07 50:03

Within days of the broadcast, Pripka is arrested.

SPEAKER_00 50:08

Welcome back to our interview with legendary journalist Sam Donaldson. From a personal standpoint, how did that make you feel that you were part of uncovering this gentleman's past and he was brought to justice?

SPEAKER_02 50:24

I didn't feel I was a hero. I didn't feel like we were lucky in the sense that we pursued the opportunity to look for people that were on the list once the Argentine government made their records public. And I was pleased that the interviewer worked out well from the standpoint that he did talk to me, which was a mistake on his part, I suppose. That it generated a lot of public interest once it occurred. I was pleased when he was finally convicted in Italy at the response of Italians then alive, of course, still in 1995, 1994, 95, who lived through World War II and had relatives who had been killed by the Nazis. And I was pleased they felt some relief that one of the perpetrators of all of this horror had been brought to justice.

SPEAKER_00 51:23

Let's talk about your time as White House correspondent during the time of deregulation of the airlines and terrorism in the 1980s. What stands out to you most about those two topics covering the White House for ABC News?

SPEAKER_02 51:39

Well, the 80s were a period of transition. Uh right Reagan, Ronald Reagan himself, who was elected in 1980 and took office in January of 81, was a transitional president. He himself was presiding over the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and there was a transition which he helped create in favor of the elimination of the threat. There was a transition in the way Americans were living uh in the economy. So looking at all that, let's talk about business. Let's talk about the airline business. In 1979, we had eleven major airlines that were called major trunks in this country serving the public. Pan Am, of course, the premier one, the Continental and Eastern, and TWA, and on and on, 11 of them. And there was a Civil Aeronautics Board, which was a regulator. Because what I've discovered, and it's easy to discover if you think about it, maybe the capitalistic system is the best system. A system which allows people to rise on their merits, on their ability to work hard, obey the laws, make something of themselves. I mean, here in Albuquerque, Jeff Bezos was born. Well, good for you. And you made it to Amazon, and at one point the richest person in the world. And uh Bill Gates in Albuquerque formed a little company with his friend Paul Allen called Microsoft. Bill Gates kind of did it in the garage. He got college dropout. But the system allowed him and Microsoft to become a great company. So I like the capitalistic system, but unregulated, allowed to run amok, the greedy ones, the sharpies, the crooks take advantage. So the Civil Aeronautics Board controlled these airlines, and M and the others. If you wanted to uh raise your fares, you had to apply to the CAB. Just as today in most cities, if the electric company wants to raise its fares, it had to apply to the State Commission and all of that. Regulation keeps it from running amok. And the idea is that if you eliminate that regulation, then the competition can flow. Now newcomers can come in. It won't be a closed society of people that are controlled in the way they operate by the government. Hey, some kid like Bill Gates, you know, does something. It forms a new little airline, let's say. So in 1979, the CAB was written out of by law existence. Jimmy Carter and Alfred Kahn and the chairman helped to do this, thinking it was going to promote the business for all Americans to thrive from it. Well, really? Look what's happened today. The big trunks are gone. Only three remain United, the American Airline Consortium and Delta. And those three are not regulated. They have to obey the laws of the country, but they're not regulated. They can raise whatever the traffic will bear. How much you want to pay? Uh what size of the seat that you want to sit in if we make more seats? And one trip had seats, I remember them, in the coach section, as wide as in the first class section today in most airlines. And one trip served in the coach section hot meals today. What? In the first class section, you're not getting a hot meal worth anything. Most of it you'd like to spit out if you didn't need the energy. And the prices you pay, every seat is taken. Because the airlines have discovered that if you eliminate a lot of your flights, that used to say, well, we have three or four flights today to this city. And so it's 65% full, it's great. No, they have one flight or two. Now it's 100% full, and you're on the waiting list to see if you can get a seat. Good luck. Well, that's what happened to data regulation. That's what happened in this transitional period of the late 70s and the 80s. In politics, of course, the transition is even more pronounced in the sense that the two parties that used to work together contending with different views, all the views, most of them crazy, but very few, very, very few people are crazy. And people who were elected to both houses, the Senate and the House, usually had experience in government. They'd served on county councils, county commissioners. They'd been maybe the governor of their state. Maybe they'd been in the House and they'd moved to the Senate. But they knew government, they knew how to make legislation work, they knew how to work with the other party to find a way to settle differences so that you could move forward.

SPEAKER_03 56:37

Not today.

SPEAKER_00 56:39

Let's talk a little bit about the White House press charters. When the president would travel, select members of the media were invited to fly with him on Air Force One. And the rest of the White House press pool followed on a chartered aircraft. And for many years, that was Pan American World Airways. Some of the people that I've talked to, the journalists would call that plane the party plane because they had their favorite drinks ready for the journalists, uh, good food, and you didn't have to worry about the pomp and circumstance of Air Force One. Would you like to comment and tell us some stories about traveling the world with the president of the United States?

SPEAKER_02 57:25

Well, that's right. Yes, there was a press pool and it rotated from the standpoint of the networks. Sometimes, as the White House correspondent, I'd travel on Air Force One with the President. Other times I'd be on the press plane with most of the press corps that was following the president. And normally the press plane would arrive before the president at a certain destination, particularly if it was a foreign country to be given an hour or more to set up to greet the president with the cameras in position and all of that. Now, when you say Air Force One was one thing, but the press plane was known as the party plane. Maybe that was true, but usually only on return trips. As you're going out to another country for a meeting with uh other world leaders, uh there wasn't much partying to do. But at the end of the trip, when you're going home, the work is over, really. It's been a successful trip for the press. And you hope for the president, you let your hair down, so to speak. And I remember one coming back from Asia. We had a great time, and we always have a great time, and the staff, and often you get the same, and it would be young women in those days, or or not so young, maybe but usually women, although today, of course, it's a mixture of men and women, would be the same people. You you'd recognize so and so and call them by name, and they'd recognize you by name. They did their job, and you understood they had a job to do that was different from the one you'd been doing. But so it wasn't just one big group, but it was a family of sorts. And coming back from Asia on one particular flight, I got into a discussion with my good close personal friend, Jody Powell, who was the White House uh press secretary for President Carter. I liked Jody a lot, but I contended with him at briefings and all of that, and he would answer the questions or not answer the questions, whatever. And we were both drinking. And at one point he had a glass of red wine in his hand and he just threw it on me. I mean, it splashed all over. I don't remember what I had on, great suit like this, splashed all over me. Started back and all of that. Come on, Jody. I mean, fists didn't fly. Uh, we were both and that that was the end of that episode, I thought. About three weeks later, Jody said to me one day, he said, you know, I I I worried about that. Uh I said, I'm sorry I didn't and all that. And he said, but uh I worried that you would report that and that you would make a big deal out of it. That here the press secretary of the president had thrown a glass of wine at the end of a foreign trip on a reporter of some uh, if not renowned, at least uh people knew who I was for ABC News. I said, Why would I do that? Well, I said, uh, you didn't. But I just were come on, Judy. Uh I consider when we're not in a formal session of uh press briefing or how in the press room of the White House or elsewhere, and that you're not doing your job as the press secretary, and I'm doing my job as ABC News correspondent, then we're just two guys who kind of like each other, and uh not not that I like being being the recipient of your glass of wine. I prefer to have drunk, I would have preferred to have drunk it. That was one of the one of the episodes I remembered. Uh and there were just other good times. Again, the press was not considered the enemy by most people, uh, and certainly not by the airlines at Lewis, certainly not by the Pan Am people with Lewis. Uh one of my last moments on Pan Am was from Madrid uh President Reagan had stopped over in Spain at the end of an economic summit somewhere else in Europe just for a brief visit with the King Carlos and there and then went on. And those of us in the business of television news had to stay and create the television piece with the audio and the video and send it to New York so we couldn't go on the press plane. We couldn't hold up the press plane for six hours while we you know did all this. So I had a Pan Am ticket and got on the plane, and we were all informed that the captain said this is our last flight from Madrid. Now I guess it must have been in '88, possibly '87, but I can't remember the year. And Pan Am went on, but they were discontinuing flights, and this would be the last time Pan Am flew from Madrid, Spain. So we all had champagne, courtesy of Pan Am. All the passengers celebrated the fact that this great airline uh would give us champagne on its last flight. It was a great airline. I think we all miss Pan Am and the other big airlines that no longer exist, and the and the way airlines treated passengers, and passengers came to to want that. And today uh airlines will treat you what they perceive to be in the best interest of making money, and passengers pay it.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:44

Let's talk about terrorism, especially in the 1980s. Lockerby, for instance, the attempted hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 in Karachi, Pakistan in 1986. How was it covering the White House? And you had these American airlines, TWA, Pan Am being the target of terrorism?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:08

When 103 went down, of course I wasn't there, I didn't cover that. But on the first anniversary of the Downing, the program that I was associated with Primetime Live, which I did with Diane Sawyer and others on ABC News, decided to go back and look at all of that. So I did. I went back uh to Lockerby. Uh and we saw still the remains uh of that tragedy had not been cleared up on the ground completely, or the fuselage has come down in the middle of the village, the cockpit had come down in a field somewhere nearby. And we traced it by this time. Investigators were hot on the trail of Libya, hot on the trail of a bomb having been planted by Libyan agents, probably in Frankfurt, uh went on to London and of course flew toward the United States and then exploded. And the way that the terrorists were doing this, and on other airlines you mentioned in the Middle East, was by planting bombs, air airport security was being ramped up. It was not possible really now to get on an airplane with a Tuzi or another high-powered weapon concealed under your overcoat. You had the magnetometers that check people and other ways of checking it. But the baggage was another problem. Getting all the baggage checked everywhere was a problem. I know I used to fly to Asia and remember one time I was coming back from Hong Kong, and the policy then was if someone didn't show up for the plane at the last moment, but their baggage had been checked, you had to remove all the baggage and get that baggage off of the airplane, whether it'd been whether it'd been gone through a checking process or not. And for about four hours, because of the problems of getting people to do all of this, we sat there on the uh people say uh the airplane's head on the runway. No, we weren't sitting on the runway, we were sitting near a taxiway while they removed all the all the baggage. So we were used to flying commercially when we had to in the news business, and we had to, if we were not on a press plane at the White House, uh to having these things occur, and they were absolutely necessary.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:33

Let's talk about the noble but dangerous profession of journalism. Let's go back to August of 1992 in Syrievo. You were on assignment there. Do you want to share some stories uh and memories about that time?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:48

Well, I went to what was then Yugoslavia to interview a man named Panic, who was an American citizen but of Yugoslav uh of Serbian origin, who had been brought. Brought over to be the prime minister of Yugoslavia by the man who then was the dictator, if you will, in charge of the region, a man named Milosevic. And Panich was interesting in that regard. So my producer and longtime friend, who'd been one of my White House producers, and before that, David Kaplan, a young man in his 30s, went over. We did interviews in Belgrade. And then when Panich flew on a UN plane to Sarajevo for a look at that area, we went with him. And at the airport, I told Kaplan to stay at the airport because it was dangerous. But I rode in an armored vehicle in with a camera crew to further look at Panich's work as he met people in the headquarters building in Sarajevo. Kaplan, however, uh decided maybe I'd need him. So he hitched a ride with a news organization that had a van unmarked and left the airport to ride to Sarajevo. And a sniper shot at the van, which was again unmarked. And three people, including David, were sitting together in a bench at the rear of the van, and the shot hit David. And they brought him in and worked on him at an aid station, if you will, for about an hour and a half before pronouncing him dead. And it was a shock to all of us, and a great sad moment to me. I remember we went back to Belgrade that night to get everything in order for our primetime live broadcast, which by luck, bad, or good, was going to be that day, that night. And we had to do this long piece about the death of our friend David Kaplan, the assistant producer. Would sit there when I'd write some of the script and he'd cry a little bit, then I'd give him the voice over to be married with a picture, and I'd cry a little bit, and we'd go back and forth. But we did it. Kaplan, of course, is just one of those journalists in modern times whose name is in a list of lengthening journalists around the world who are killed because they're working in a business profession, if you will, that angers so many people. In this case, it was just a sniper. Bad luck for David. But what we see today is journalists in Mexico, for instance, particularly being killed by the narcos because of the journalists' ability to try to expose their views and not just in Mexico but other places. If you can kill the press, it's like the old Shakespeare saying, first kill the lawyers. Meaning, if you want to be a dictator, if you want to take over a country, if you want to eliminate democracy, you have to kill the lawyers because they will represent people who fight against that. Same thing about journalists, reporters. If you want to do it, you have to eliminate the free press. That's why we have a First Amendment, trying to preserve a free press. Although in our country today, there are so many people who say they hate reporters or they hate the news media because they've been told to. They haven't thought about what it means if they lose the ability to have someone other than the government looking over what's happening and exposing wrongdoing and misdeeds. They're going to be far worse off. But that's what is happening around the world. It's a dangerous profession. I didn't, when I was working it, with the exception of my friend being killed in Sarajevo, I didn't consider it personally dangerous. And yet there had been journalists killed in the United States by that time, or badly mauled for, again, trying to expose wrongdoing. Because if you are a crook, if you are doing something that is illegal, you don't want it in the paper, you don't want it on ABC News. You don't want it on the radio because that might be a problem. Authorities might bring you to a court, a grand jury. You might be charged with an illegal act. You might have to go to jail. So kill them.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:29

It's a really good point. And uh I wanted our listeners to hear that because it's often overlooked by many, the sacrifice that members of the media go through. And sometimes members of the media lose their lives in the pursuit of journalism and informing the public on information and news that is important and important that the public know of it. So that's why. So thank you very much, and my condolences about your friend. So you are an esteemed journalist, and you have worked with many legends in the news business: David Brinkley, Ted Koppel, Peter Jennings, Koki Roberts, Diane Steuer, Barbara Walters. Can you share some stories about them that come to mind?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:22

Well, Barbara Walters died just a few weeks before we're talking on this podcast. Uh, she was a great friend of mine. Uh, I admired her tremendously. She was not everybody's cup of tea. I understand that, but that's that's fine. And Barbara came to ABC News, having been successful at NBC as a co-anchor of the Today Show. She was hired in 1976 in order to try to boost the ratings of our third-rated. There were three networks, and we were third-rated and the early evening broadcasts. She was hired and teamed with Harry Riesner, who came from CBS. And they didn't get along. Harry couldn't stand being teamed with a woman in those days. Women like Barbara were pioneers leading the way to what is now almost an equal woman's world in the news business, at least at the networks. And uh she was removed because it wasn't working out. Still, she had a contract with ABC. Now she could have said, Well, it's sexism, and look what they've done to me because I'm a woman. Instead, she just kept working. She hadn't yet made her mark with these great interviews for the Academy Awards or with the things on 2020. She then later did. So she got on a plane with Ted Koppel and me on a trip that Jimmy Carter was taking to a number of countries as a working journalist with the two of us. I was the White House correspondent, and she was had no title whatsoever. Coppel was the State Department correspondent. And we had a good time, and we learned that Barbara was one of the boys. Excuse the phraseology, but she pitched in, she worked. One of our wonderful moments was in India. Uh, at the end of the busy day, we went to a restaurant, the three of us. Now, the Prime Minister of India at that time, a man named Marajid Asai, was in his early 80s, and it was considered to be a long life. I consider it still almost a kit. But the point is, he attributed his long life to the fact that he drank every morning a quantity of his own urine. And this wasn't a rumor. He said this.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:45

Wow, that's very odd.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:47

We thought it was, but that night at the restaurant, one of us we ordered a bottle of white wine. Now I can't remember which one of us was the first to say as we sipped our wine. Well, it's not a great urine, but uh it's it's a fairly good urine. And somebody said, but for a urine it travels well. And that's uh somebody said, Well, the aroma of the urine leaves something to be desired, but it's it's not offensive. And of course, the people at this upscale restaurant, the native Indians who spoke better English than we did, they were trained by the British after all. They began to be offended by this. We weren't yelling this, but the moment was Barbara. It was great. I think you're the best interviewer in the United States on television. I said you interviewed yes, Hollywood stars and all that, but you interviewed politicians, you interviewed world leaders. Yeah, at the first interview putting Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, and Rachel Began, then the Prime Minister of Israel, together at the same broadcast. Ah, Bible, you're a million dollars. Anyway, you're the best interviewer. Because I knew, I know that you do your homework. That's one reason. Because she would call someone like me and say, Well, I'm doing Colin Powell next week. What's hot? What's he involved in? What's going on? Okay, fine. And I know you follow up. If someone answers a question, leads you another direction, you forget your questions you had in mind, you go in that direction. So, what is the one thing, Barbara, you think really helped you be outstanding? She smiled, she grinned, and she said half-facetiously, the lighting. And you say, What? The lighting? Yes. When I got into this business in the early 60s, some of the best correspondents on television, and they were thought to be by the news viewers the best, they were ugly people. Man, most of them, one of them made 50 pounds. He was the economic correspondent for CBS News. He'd been a graduate of the London School of Economics. He knew his stuff. Everybody knew that. And when uh Paul Nibbon would take on uh cage of the air, people today, he couldn't have gotten it, he can't get a job anywhere. The local station network, what have you? Have you noticed? I made it through, but just barely. All the handsome men and the handsome, beautiful women who are the correspondents, and they know their stuff. Uh the anchors, how how many ugly people do you see? And Barbara knows, and even I came to know in this business, the lighting, if properly done, can make you look your best. If not properly done, you you'll look like poor old Paul David. I mean, it'd be and it's just not going to keep your job. Sorry, folks. We are a society that puts probably too much emphasis on appearances.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:56

How about David Brinkley?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:58

Oh, David Brinkley. Well, David was the best. I mean, David could make anything sound just interesting. You know, I went downtown for lunch the other day and uh couldn't find a restaurant that was open, so I came back home. Now, if I said I went downtown for lunch the other day, couldn't find a restaurant open, I went back home. But when David Brinkley would say it, hmm, he made his bones at NBC. He was the last NBC correspondent sent to the White House to cover a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And he would tell stories about that. And Brinkley's story was worth listening to. He was just one of the great icons of the business. And along with the others, we don't have them today. And one of the reasons we don't have them is the multiplicity of places to work. You can't assemble an audience like Walter Cronkite assembled at CBS when there were just three networks, when you've got not so many cable networks and so many places on the internet to go to find news or to find information, to find comedy, to find whatever. You know, there are so many sites. I was very fortunate. I was the Watergate correspondent for ABC News, and I covered the hearings in the Senate committee, it was investigating it, the Watergate Committee, so to call. And uh every week, one network would cover them live all day long. The first week, all three did, and they all three were losing money. They didn't have no commercials, you know. Uh, and so they decided every week ABC would be the network. And our anchor Frank Reynolds would be in the studio, and Sam Donaldson would be up there on Capitol Hill in the committee room, and then during breaks when they would go vote or some have lunch, I'd be out there talking to Frank and interviewing people. And in those days, billions and millions of Americans were fascinated and interested in this story. Was Richard Nixon, the president of the United States, behind this break-in? Had he committed the obstruction of justice and all of that? And if you were watching, you had to watch me. You didn't have a choice to go. Hey, I watch uh BBC, I'll watch uh uh CBS, I'll watch the cable that were, I'll watch Fox News. No, me. Well, nobody has that ability today. No anchor, no reporter. You don't have to watch any of them, and there are so many of them, and many of them good people. I put emphasis on appearance. There are a few I look at and say, hey, this person may be good looking, but they don't know what they're talking about. Good people, so the news business has changed in that respect, and that's probably all right. It's okay. But what isn't okay in the news business is organizations that not just individuals, but organizations that disregard the facts and tell you no, the apple does not fall down, as Newton said, it falls sideways, and the way we know that is because it's a conspiracy to believe that the apple falls down, and uh there are there are people, for instance, on cable news today who will clearly side with Vladimir Putin, who is the dictator in in Russia and who is waging war in the Ukraine because he believes that the great empire that Russia might have once been deserves to be reconstituted by a force of arms, and the rest of the world can just go fig if it wants to. And uh this person, and even one that worked, says that we shouldn't continue to support Ukraine. Well, that's free speech. Okay, I'll grant you that, but it's a distortion of the facts, believe that because they're making money off this one-third of the country. They don't have most of the country watching them, but they have the third that wants to believe whatever they hear. And if you say, Well, would you look at some of these things which we think are facts and don't trust me about that, you'll check it yourself? They don't even want to hear that. I don't know what the remedy is for that. What is the malevolency for ignorance? It is ignorance I'm talking about. And ignorance is not, you don't have a good mind, you weren't born, hey, opposite unprivileged, you're not ignorance is not trying to learn the facts on something. Tomorrow it may turn out this fact wasn't a fact after all, and so you have to correct it, and science moves along. And yes, Mr. discovers maybe you should wash your hands when you have an operation. Yes, right. Um but people who refuse to even consider the facts as presented by others who say we've investigated, and here's the fruit of our investigation, here's how we investigated. Please check it out.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:08

Let's talk about your personal life for a moment. You did something very courageous uh when you were at ABC News when you were diagnosed with cancer and you have become a strong cancer advocate. Uh, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your journey and why you wanted it to be public?

SPEAKER_02 1:22:27

Well, I was very fortunate. Uh in 1995, one morning in the shower, I discovered a lump in my groin that I thought hadn't been there. It probably had been. I just discovered it soaping it and all that. And I went to a doctor, I found the doctor in those days. Hey, young men, I must have been only in my late 50s, and he said, Well, you have to take a biopsy. He took a biopsy, he said, Oh, that's melanoma. That's very serious. What do I do? Well, you have to have it removed. But I want you to go out and see a man who's who's the expert of melanoma. He is the chief surgeon of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda. Now that's not a place that deals with patients necessarily. It's a research center. It does have a hospital for patients who are in certain trials to determine better ways of doing things medically. But uh go go out and see him. Uh so I said, All right. So I went out and uh met the doctor, and he looked, I'd taken a scan and all of this and the biopsy report, and uh he examined me. And he said, You know something? I I think you guys, we have to operate, you have to out. He said, I think you have a good chance of living a long, normal, healthy life. And I blurted out, I don't believe you, because I thought I'd heard that melanoma was very deadly. If I had melanoma, and I said to my wife, you know, maybe I have three months, we'll see. Well, it turned out that he was right, in the sense that at that point, when they removed the lymph nodes from my right groin, they found this only one. Uh he came in one day and lie in the bed there, because they'd done the surgery there. Uh, he said, You're in a trial, and you fit the profile of people we're looking for for the trial perfectly. Because I said, Listen, if we bend the rules, because I have some prominence as a television reporter, to get me in this trial, we haven't worried about the melanoma killing me. My my colleagues in the press business will kill us both. So now he said that you're okay. So he came in the room, he's smiling. He said, It couldn't be better, it couldn't be better. He said, There's only one lymph node involved, and the surrounding tissue is clean. Oh, I said, doctor wasn't right. I said it could be better if I hadn't had melanoma at all. Yes, we want, for instance, we want optimistic doctors. And during the time that I was waiting to go out to see him, got in the newspaper and my staff at ABC News in Washington, because I had a division there for this primetime live program. Diane saw yours was in New York, mine was in Washington. I called them together and I said, I've got this problem and that you should know about it. Because in the news business in those days, and it's certainly true today, I understand, uh, you didn't just work for ABC News, you worked for World News Tonight at ABC News, or uh Good Morning America, ABC News, or Primetime Live at ABC News. And if that division went away, and of course, if something happened to me, the Washington part of Primetime Live would go away, you would go away. So I thought they had they should vote. And they got a newspaper, and I got a call on Monday morning. My assistant said, uh, uh Senator Connie Mack is on the line for you. Well, I knew who Connie Mack was. I'd never covered him. I'd seen him, I guess I'd met him. Uh he's a senior senator from Florida, uh conservative Republican. Uh, and I took the call, of course. And he said, Sam, I understand you have melanoma problems. I said, Well, it appears I do, Senator. He said, Don't worry about it. He said, uh, I had six years ago I had melanoma skin tumors uh and uh it looked pretty bad, but they're all gone now. They're all gone, and you're gonna be just fine. Well, I must tell you, Tom, I have followed my good, close personal friend Connie Mack, whose political ideology I really don't share. I would follow him to the gates of hell. He wouldn't ask me to go through them because call did for me what I then began doing after my experience for other people. I'd read about them, uh, and two things would happen. They'd call me and they'd say, You had melanoma and I have melanoma. I said, Listen, two things. I'm gonna give your name with your permission and phone number, Dr. Stephen Rosenberg, who's the chief scientist of National Cancer Institute. He's gonna call you. He's just gonna check, he's he can't diagnose you, he can't treat you, but he can see whether the treatment you're getting is the state of the art at this moment. And secondly, here's my experience, and you're gonna be fine. Just don't worry about that. Just take care of the things you normally need to do to try to see what therapy you need. Well, this went on for many years, and I joined a number of cancer organizations, and the best one for me was the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. A man named H. Lee Moffat in the 70s had experienced a little cancer himself, but he had two friends who died of cancer, and he was a member of the Florida House of Representatives. And he realized that the state of Florida did not have a large Cancer Institute, no Sloan catering there. No, no, no, no. One of the great cancer centers for research and for hospitalization in the country. Anyone to get one started? And to make the story very short, he did get one started. And today Moffat Cancer Center is toward the top of the list of great cancer centers in the United States for both research and for patient care. It keeps expanding and it it takes care of millions of patients over this period of time. Well, they Connie Mac asked me to come down. And I formed an advisory committee in the early part of this century. And an advisory committee to business uh does two things. It doesn't advise the business, that's for the board to do. It tries to spread the word about the business and raise money for the business. And that's what I helped and have still good day for the Moffat Cancer Center. I'm I'm fortunate at the time I had this uh melanoma tumor, the research showed that there was a 55% chance that it would I'd see it again. It already had gone into other parts of my body and resurfaced, but it didn't. I was part of the lucky 45%. And I just want people who have a cancer diagnosis today know that at the time since 1995, when I had the diagnosis of melanoma, the advances not just in all diseases, but particularly in in trying to find a way to erudicate cancer have been tremendous. You have so much better chance, not just with melanoma, but almost every other cancer. There are some that still elude any help, very few. But most of them you're gonna benefit more today. Go to the right people, go to the right centers. Don't look online and try to diagnose yourself. And always have an optimistic view. What does it hurt you?

SPEAKER_00 1:30:08

Last question for you, sir. We have a lot of young people that listen to our program from all over the world. Do you have any advice or messages you would like to talk to them about? History and why it's important to view history in an important lens.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:28

Well, I'm on two areas. One, some of the basic facts of society. Honesty is the best policy. Don't think you can get away with it always. That is cutting corners, adopt the golden rule, treat thy neighbors like thyself. In other words, be a good citizen, obey the laws, all of that. However, I used to give uh graduation speeches at colleges. I'm honored to ask. And I would say to the young graduates, these are college graduates or university graduates at the ceremony, I'd say, a lot of people say find something you love to do in life and pursue it. I said, that's the that's wrong. I'll tell you why. You may love you think to be a concert pianist. You may admire a concert pianist. Maybe you had one in your family who was really great, but whatever it is, and you study hard and you're willing to study hard and you're willing to have good instructors and you're will willing to practice every day and you become a concert pianist, but whatever that God-given thing is that raises concert pianists from the ordinary, from the okay to the great, you don't have that. So don't beat yourself against the wall of being ordinary because that's something you think you love. Instead, find something you're good at. Because you may not have what it takes to be a concert pianist, but believe me, you have probably more than one talent you don't even recognize that you're good at. Maybe you turn out to be the best welder in town. Maybe, maybe you turn out to be the greatest physicist, maybe mathematics, I don't know what it is. Maybe you are a movie star, maybe you have a talent that others don't have as great, and you become a great something else. And you may have to experiment a while in in your early in your late teens, your early 20s, mid-20s. Time you get to be 40, you better found something you're doing and pursue it. So find something you're good at. If you do, and you will, if you keep looking around and trying things, then you will love it because you're good at what you do. And the world will love you. You want the money? Here's the money. You want the awards, here's the here's the awards. I'll give you an example. Albert Gore Sr. was a senator from Tennessee. He had a son, Albert Gore Jr. Albert Gore Sr. lusted for the presidency of the United States, but he realized that times had changed. As a segregationist, he was not going to win the presidency of the United States. But he wanted his son to go into politics. Albert Gore Jr. He dabbled with one big photographer. He dabbled and wasn't going to a seminary. He was thinking about going into the church. But his father and his mother kept saying to him, Oh, politics is what you need to do. You're going to do that. Well, he did. He went to the House of Representatives and he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Then he became Bill Clinton's vice president of the United States. And then he came within a whisker of becoming president of the United States in the election of 2000. And he lost. And now he found something that he was really good at the environment, the global warming problem, the problem of how to preserve this planet. And in pursuing that, he was so good, he won the Nobel Prize. And he was happy. But he finally was able to find something that he was good at, and he loved it, and the world rewarded him for that. So that's a lesson I would ask young people to think about.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:34

Very inspiring message. Well, again, sir, it has been a privilege and an honor to have you on this program brought to you by the Pan Am Museum. And I can't thank you enough for your time.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:47

Well, Tom, thanks very much to you. I've enjoyed the interview. You've allowed me to express myself, and I appreciate that. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:24

For more information about the Pan Am Museum, check out our website at www.thepanammuseum.org. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. As was once a tagline in one of our commercials, we would greatly appreciate your support to help the Pan Am Museum continue making the going great. You can also support the museum by shopping on our online store for all things Pan Am accessories, apparel, jewelry, books, models, and posters. We want to hear from you. If you have a question for us or want to share your story, our email address is podcast at the Pan Ammuseum.org. In honor of Sam Donaldson, we are going to close out this episode with the 1979 themed song of ABC News. As flight crews once said to passengers departing for their destinations around the world, thank you for flying, Pan Am.