YouSaid · the spoken record

David Sanger

lines on the record
80
first
2017-11-27
most recent
2017-11-27
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “When the North Koreans made an incremental advance, whether it was building that reactor I described before, or whether it was beginning to build their missiles, or whether it was taking the plutonium out of the reactor and shipping it off to a secret spot at a moment that we were busy invading Iraq and not paying as much attention. Presidents had the opportunity to go take action to stop them. And the one who considered it most closely was Bill Clinton in 1994 during a very big crisis where there was a plan afoot to actually take military action if they needed to.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The grandfather and the father pursued along those lines the grandson and we can come back to this later on Kim Jong Un I think has greater ambitions. To your question could we have stopped this? David, this has been one of the greatest long running failures of the US government for understandable reasons for the past twenty five years back to George HW Bush. It is not the fault of Democrats or Republicans. It is the fault of Democrats and Republicans. At each point”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Motivation, I think, has changed a little bit over time. The program started because Kimil Sung, the country's founder and the grandfather of the current president of North Korea, remembered that Douglas MacArthur had sought nuclear weapons to end the Korean War. He wanted to go bomb North Korea, and along the way bomb the Chinese who were coming in on North Korea's behalf between 1950 and 1953. Harry Truman didn't think this was such a great idea and fired MacArthur famously. But the North Koreans never forgot and believed that if they were going to keep their country from being invaded by the United States, they needed nuclear weapons. And I think that”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Six or eight months there that I began to notice that the North Koreans who couldn't build a light bulb were building a nuclear reactor and wrote some of the first pieces about that.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, usually if you win a Pulitzer at the Times, usually we've got a couple of months before they forget that you want a pullit, just sort of raise your hand for something. I raised my hand to jump the queue and go to Japan as a foreign correspondent. And it seemed to fit nicely with a technology background because these were the days when Japan was eating our lunch, going to take over the world, producing all the world's computer chips, dominating our technology. And Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, used to come out and give speeches. I teased him about this later on, about how the United States would become a technocolony of Japan. Didn't quite turn out that way, but I had six fabulous years when Cheryl and I had just gotten married and we moved out and it was a moment to not only exploit Japan but explore all of Asia and it was during that time by about my friends.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “and President Reagan had told him whatever you do don't embarrass NASA we have to keep the space shuttle running. So the commission initially was not very interested in figuring out what had happened if it meant embarrassing NASA save for a couple of members who really wanted to dig down to the truth including Professor Feynman, the famed physicist who had Satatova nuclear weapon the night before they was first tested at the Trinity site as a young man and he ended up being a terrific source for sort of talking me through what had actually happened.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “We had big investigation underway. We knew that we had sort of with that moment probably cracked the case that it wasn't a computer glitch. I was put on the story for the wrong reason. Yeah. Right, as things happen with reporters. And we were ahead of a presidential commission that was being run by Bill Rogers, the former Secretary of State during the Nixon administration. He was by that time back in private practice.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “We did. I was 26. I was incredibly lucky to be put on a team with some really terrific reporters. And we found, two or three of us found the engineers who admitted to us that this was no accident at all, that they had seen the fourteen or fifteen previous space shuttle missions nearly blow up. And I remember the evening that I was able to get Roger Beaujola was an engineer working for Morton Thiocol in the hills of Utah to hand over to me the facts he had sent the night before the launch with the graphs that showed that if they launch at the temperatures that it was going to be a very cold night in Florida, the likelihood of an accident of burn through from these Rocket engines was extremely high, and that's exactly what happened the next time.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I began writing about the personal computer industry with Andy Pollock, who is a great technology writer for the Times, just recently retired from the Times. And we did that for a number of years, and I was down in Washington in 1986 writing a story that you probably still write today about how screwed up the computer systems of the IRS were when the space shuttle exploded. And we thought at first that it was actually a computer error. And that was how I got placed on the Challenger space shuttle team.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I did. I was with Steve Jobs for the week that ran up to the introduction of the Macintosh in New York. And, you know, I knew this was like a big thing at the time, but only in retrospect does it seem so huge. I was out in Santa Fe this summer and speaking out in Santa Fe and they invited me to an opera they had created about Steve Jobs and it had that week in the opera you know so just sort of think that I had been involved in that was quite remarkable and then”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Raise your hand. So I had had some summer internships, including one at the Wall Street Journal with a wonderful editor in the Boston Bureau of the Journal who was fascinated by this newfangled thing that was coming out called a personal computer being built by Apple. And so under his direction, began writing some about this whole question, would people actually use computers at home? And I remember discussing this with my dad who had spent his career working on big mainframes like the IBM System 360 and a design some of IBM's big computer centers. And even he was quite skeptical that people would find a use for computer. At home now, you know, he's never without his iPad anywhere.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And by the way, Cheryl and I have now been married for what 30 years plus, and we met our freshman year, which our own kids think is hilarious. Yeah.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It's a true story, except as soon as I sat down whether I realized I had done just fine by missing the other date. So the trauma”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “It turned into a big story that outraged President Bush because he thought that someone was leaking to us of what was going on. Well, we had actually, from various things we'd picked up in the hallways, intuited our way to the story. Not the last time that's happened.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “He started there. So, you know what a great collaborative career is. We're sitting having coffee one day in the Starbucks around the corner from the Times Bureau on Washington, and we're talking about things we're hearing happening. He was covering the Pentagon, I was covering White House at the time, about pressuring President Bush to close Guantanamo Bay. And we realized in the course of our conversation the more we got into it, that Condoleezza Rice and the Defense Secretary at the time, Bob Gates, must have teamed together to try to get President Bush to close Gitmo and overrun lots of opposition they had. And it just came out of a conversation like the one we're having today. We went off and reported it.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “They're a lot shorter. And I actually think the collaboration may be better in a newsroom. I teach a course on national security now. And the pace of the newsroom versus the university always sort of strikes me. But I do have to say that there are a lot of stories we've broken that just come from that open kind of conversation. For example, during the Bush administration, I remember going and having coffee with a great friend of mine, Tom Shanker, who covered the Pentagon. He's now in editing.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Same thing. I mean, if you love the collaboration and sometimes the competition of a newsroom, we still work out, we all look like we're selling insurance, we work out in open cubicles. And if you went down and looked at it, it might not look so impressive. But there is a collaboration of ideas in a newsroom that I've only seen replicated at a university, you know, where people actually sit and try to go talk their way through to a story. And I can't tell you how many deadlines.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Took a little detour to that, turned out to work out well. Bill McKibben was running the Crimson at that time environmentalist and”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “He did okay. And we were tutored in how to write a lead by Susan Shira, who later became the deputy executive editor of The Times and is now covering all kinds of fascinating gender issues. But we had many other journalists. Jeff Tubin was on that same group at the Crimson. Now, of course, took a little detour to law school.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “There were there was a lot of interest in being a journalist. So my first day at the Crimson, I met a guy who turned out to become a lifelong friend who was also trying to get on the Crimson. His name was Nick Christoph. Yeah.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Those stories got me going and I decided I've got to go see what the newsroom's like. And that wasn't easy. One of the senior editors at the times long since passed away. I remember saying to me my senior year, well, the newsroom's very crowded. Meaning I shouldn't go and help stuff it up. He should see it today. I bet.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I had a couple of front page pieces in the Times as a stringer. Your byline never showed up in those days. It was this little line that said special to the New York Times, to the point that my college roommates used to call me, hey, special. Well, it's good to be special. Yeah, right, right.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So I went to college and then I had to decide, am I going to go to law school like all the rest of my classes? And you wrote.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “We've got to tell people, though, that the phrase comes from the fact that they used to pay you by measuring the length of your story with a string. Yes. Yeah. And not very much.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “My first stories for the Times were for a now defunct Westchester County supplement that we used to turn out, and I wrote some stories in high school, including about issues of free press for high school newspapers. So the thing that high school news editors often feel strongly about because they run into principles, as I did. So I wrote a number of pieces and then started writing some things from them, went to college and continued on as a stringer while I was also on my college paper. The word stringer, of course, known to you from your days.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “He didn't. He had left The Times twenty years before, fifteen years before I came of an age to go there. So when I got hired at the Times as a stringer and a news clerk later on running pieces of paper around in a time that we were just bringing computers into the newsroom, nobody there really knew him or knew of him and he had been off in the radio station.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “to pay off their huge debts right that they at the time but he stayed on for another 20 some odd years and got a lot of New York Times correspondence to go on radio and they would do this amazing show where they called around to foreign correspondents over scratchy phone lines that I used to listen to as a kid and I kept thinking wow this is pretty cool you can be a foreign correspondent and he actually lived long enough to see me get off and get assigned to my first foreign correspondent job”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “He was the co founder of that with a friend of his who had been experimenting with this wild new technology called FM. And they sold it to the New York Times in 1945 for what was the biggest media deal in history at the time. I think it was like a million dollars. No kidding. Right. All of which went.”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “It had just started a few years before, and it's in the same building that it is in today, and got sort of dragged into a longtime family business that had started down when the family had moved to Texas and kind of hated it, but went off in the middle of the Depression to start the country's first classical WQXR, yeah. I grew up in”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Well, everybody knew except me, of course, right? My dad, who is 94 and doing well, worked for IBM, actually. And so from him, I got a lot of my technology interests played later in useful, yeah. But pretty useful. And my mom worked for the school district in Westchester County where I grew up in White Plains, which is north of New York City. But there was journalism back in the family. My grandfather, Elliot Sanger, had been a member of the Columbia University School of Journalism class of nineteen seventeen. No kidding. Exactly 100 years ago. Wow. One of the first journalists. I didn't realize they had”

    2017-11-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 195 - David Sanger · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source